Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  Five miles north of Paula’s Lost, Little Mouth was a vertical pit with a slanting shaft, nothing special, a limestone cave with a spring-fed stream, little explored but much rumored. A lot of good stories came out of that cave, most often from people who had never gone farther than the first pit, the second rocky incline. Only one person had died in Little Mouth, and there was no reason to remember it at all. Except for modern geology surveys, it too might have disappeared for a few years. It was not a good one, experts said of Little Mouth, not like the little caves to the north or the watery pits in north Florida. Little Mouth’s descent was soft, as bad as Paula. Those walks tended to flake and collapse. Many of the stories were about miraculous escapes, boys who climbed out covered with dirt and boasting of how close they had come to not getting out at all. The rangers laughed at the stories until that boy was lost in 1972. After that, they treated Little Mouth like the sinks. Farther south the water table was higher, disappearances more likely, the sinks deep-shadowed pools of water as popular and risky as the quarries of the Northeast. Cypress roots bled tannic acid into the still water, producing a brown tea color and occasionally a deeper red. The dark waters reduced visibility for the cave divers who occasionally vanished into their depths. Such holes were ringed with chains solidly fixed to concrete pilings or the great old trees. Stark white crosses were planted in the earth overhangs, one for each diver who did not come out, though still the divers came. They called those holes Devil’s Eye or Red Lady or Night’s Own Hole, and the stories they told were all about looking up through the pulsing black water into a single red eye of light.

  The caves of north Georgia sport fewer than a dozen crosses. Since 1972 there was always one above the descent to Little Mouth, though no one remembers the name of the boy that was lost. Teenagers swore the cross was a sham, that the deputies put it up just to scare people off the property. Boys nailed condoms and old beer-can tabs to the cross, signed it with curse words and nicknames, and every once in a while shot it full of holes or tore it out completely, but the rangers checked the site regularly. Each time the cross disappeared, they hauled out a fresh one and hammered it into the ground. Death, Emmet told Cissy one Sunday afternoon, is more than teenagers can understand, and it is too easily found at the bottom of a hollow like the half-buried mouth of Little Mouth. The look she gave him said plainly she knew more about death than he ever imagined.

  Jean and Mim were dark and lean women, acquaintances of Nolan’s from the community college. Their eyes lit up when he told them his Brewster stories, and they plied him for details about the caves. Nolan was happy to oblige, and happier still to introduce them to his friend Cissy. When Cissy met them, her first thought was that they did not look like they were from Cayro. They looked like those heroines in the science fiction books she used to share with Nolan. When Jean looked at her, Cissy blushed as if the woman could read her mind, and felt a kind of panic that made her say yes to everything they asked.

  They’d heard from Nolan that Cissy had gone caving a lot. They were trying to start a women’s caving group, and they wanted her to join them. With the two of them looking at her, heat swept right up her spine and flashed at the base of her neck. She could not believe it. They not only were talking to her but were talking to her about the thing she loved most in the world.

  “If Mim and I do it, we get credit for physical education,” Jean told her.

  “And we won’t have to go with the men’s group. It’s full of Neanderthal jocks who just want us to climb ahead of them so they can look at our butts.” Mim had a fast drawl and ran her words together. Cissy found it hard to follow everything she said.

  “We checked them out,” Jean threw in. “Pretty wretched bunch. And they’re just using all this old nasty equipment anyway, but they’re so proud of it. Didn’t want us to use any of their stuff. Can you imagine?”

  “Yeah,” Cissy said, though she was not entirely sure what she was agreeing with, or to. She had gone caving with Charlie, for God’s sake. She could go with these women even if they did talk too fast.

  Even before they went on their first trip, Jean and Mim started loaning Cissy books and inviting her to go to the movies with them. They behaved as if they had all gone to grade school together and had just been separated briefly, as if they had some common understanding shared only by young women who enjoyed caving and wore blue jeans every day. They also touched as easily as they talked. Mim even kissed Cissy right on the mouth when Cissy showed her the roughly sketched maps of Paula’s Lost she and Nolan had made. Cissy was startled and delighted at the intimacy. She wanted to be that free, that easy in her body, that cosmopolitan and grown-up and exotic all at the same time—kissing people and cussing like a sailor the way Mim did.

  “Where’s that girl from?” Delia asked Cissy one day after Jean dropped her off and stopped in for a glass of tea. “She doesn’t look like any of the families around here.”

  “Don’t know for sure,” Cissy said.

  “She don’t look remotely Christian to me,” Amanda said as if she alone knew what “Christian” looked like. Amanda was visiting with her boys, one-year-old Michael Junior and baby Gabriel. Gabe in his little baby carrier was Delia’s whole focus. Cissy glared and stomped off to her room to read The Color Purple, which Jean said was sad enough to convince you that women needed to arm themselves for self-defense.

  Not Christian, exotic. Cissy knew what Amanda meant even as she resented her saying it. Jean and Mim were nothing like the sallow, towheaded, narrow-faced girls of Cayro. They had dark hair, high cheekbones, clear skin, and long necks. Thick, finely shaped lashes caught the light and drew you to their shining eyes. They looked like the girls in Seventeen magazine, and it was true that Mim was Jewish, though Jean was not. Jean was from Bartow County, born north of Cayro on one of those old truck farms famous for peanuts and fast-spreading potato plants.

  If Jean’s hair had been blond and stringy, if Mim had looked like M.T.’s sister Sally, wide-faced and complacent, Cissy might not have been so fascinated with the two of them. But Jean and Mim looked like Los Angeles or New York City, and they talked like it too, mentioning books and films and far-off places as casually as they hugged each other when they separated.

  The three girls started hanging out together, though Cissy never became as comfortable with them as she was with Nolan. She always felt self-conscious. Jean and Mim knew things she did not know, and she wanted them to accept her despite that fact. It astonished her that it seemed they did.

  Going caving with them would cement the friendship, Cissy hoped, thinking of the time after, when they would all sit around and talk. And to get to go down into the dark again! The thought of being able to do more than climb around in the first passage at Paula’s Lost was a powerful lure. Cissy would probably have agreed to go no matter how shy she felt. She pined for the caves when she couldn’t get out there, dreamed about them in her restless sleep.

  Jean and Mim were having trouble finding two more women willing to go. People said caving alone was suicide and that to be safe you needed a group of five. Three was tight. Accidents happened. People got tired and made stupid mistakes. Carrying someone out of one of the deep caves was a job for four or more. Cissy called one of the girls from the swim team. “You still doing that?” the girl said. “Cissy, you ought to find another hobby.”

  “Oh, hell,” Mim said finally. “You’ve been on the swim team, right? We’ve both done judo for years, and each of us can deadlift a good 120. We can do it. I don’t want to mess around too long and lose the chance to do some mapping of our own.”

  “Well, we don’t want to kill ourselves,” Jean laughed, “but it an’t like we’re going to do totally raw caves: These are known caves. And like my daddy always said, life is better if you take a risk now and then.”

  Like flirting with God, Cissy thought. God or the risk of death, or just your own hope of transfiguration. Buddhists strove for nirvana. Christians aimed for heaven. But a girl who believe
d in nothing, who just loved the dark, where did she go? It was a risk Cissy would just have to take.

  It was as good as Cissy had hoped it would be down in the cave again. Looking up into the rock ceiling at Little Mouth, she imagined she could hear gospel music in the darkness just outside of the light’s little circle. Every time Cissy went into a cave, she found herself thinking about God, the God who stacked rock on rock and watched over fatherless girls.

  God was Delia’s voice in the darkness when Cissy was tired, so soft and clear she almost believed the voice to be real. God was the thing outside herself, that enormous desire to shatter into a thousand living pieces and burn. God was the moment past orgasm, lying spent, belly-down on her own bed with her hand over her mouth—nothing she wanted any of her family to know about.

  When Cissy was younger, she had enjoyed shocking Amanda with her nonbelief, but these days that was no longer so satisfying. Amanda’s sense of constant outrage seemed to have abated with the birth of her boys and the work of managing Michael’s Sunday school classes. “It’s a pity,” Dede complained. “Amanda’s gotten so settled. She used to be such a kick in the pants.” Cissy agreed. Their manic evangelical sister was almost as settled as M.T.

  I bet God misses Amanda, Cissy thought as she was hanging onto a rock slope in Little Mouth. I bet he misses her, all noisy and insistent and challenging everybody and everything. Any God Cissy could imagine would enjoy an attitude like that. Whenever Cissy saw the steadily more haggard Amanda, she remembered how powerful her sister had been when she moved into Clint’s house on Terrill Road, the energy in her that burned so hot it had to be profane. Amanda had stormed about like one of those nasty Old Testament prophets in the desert, the ones Amanda would quote but did not seem to appreciate, men capable of cursing God and dying with the curse still on their tongues. Believing and blaspheming anyway Cissy understood intrinsically. There was no true blasphemy without belief, the kind of belief that Amanda had.

  One of Amanda’s favorite Bible verses was what Dede called the hot-water imperative, Revelation 3:16. “You are neither cold or hot,” Amanda would say, “and hell is full of the lukewarm.” God’s contempt was for those neither cold nor hot, the ones He would spit out of His mouth, the ones like Cissy and Dede, and probably Delia. Lukewarm was the word for them all, Cissy knew, but Revelation seemed a reprise of the Old Testament God, the one who saw no problem when Lot’s daughters were thrown to the roughnecks on the streets of Sodom. For mercy or understanding they would have to go to Jesus. The last big family fight had taken place when Dede had gotten stoned and started casting the made-for-television version of the Bible.

  “Alan Alda as Jesus,” Dede suggested. “But he’s too old. Maybe Timothy Hutton or Richard Gere, one of those sensitive guys who has issues with his daddy.”

  Amanda had gone blue in the face. “Hell won’t be hot enough for you,” she said. “The devil will have to dig you a special pit and pack it with charcoal.”

  No, even pregnant and exhausted, Amanda had no lukewarm in her. Her notion of Jesus was the Christ who chased the moneylenders out of the temple. At Tabernacle Baptist there was a painted glass figure of Jesus, backlit by 60-watt bulbs that retracted into the ceiling when baptisms were being performed. It was a pastel Jordan River that picked up the murky green paint from the baptismal font below. At Amanda’s wedding the painting had been pulled up into the ceiling near the brighter light, and Jesus’ features were foreshortened into a comic mask, the cheeks too pink and the eyes obviously mascara’ d—like a rock star in a music video with his arms open wide and sweat streaking down. Female, Cissy had thought when she saw that painted glass image. Jesus looked oddly female. Get Sigourney Weaver, she had almost said to Dede—get some dark-haired, hot-eyed woman to play Jesus. That might have upset Dede as much as it would have Amanda.

  Female, Cissy thought, every time she tilted her head back into the chilly drafts that swept through the outer passages at Little Mouth. The dark was female and God was dark. God was dangerous, big, frightening, mysterious, and female. And blasphemous. Sometimes Cissy wished she could explain to Amanda how she thought about the divine. Not biblical but familial. Not Jehovah, but Delia with her head thrown back and that raw soaring song pouring out of her open mouth. That was spiritual, that was the power of the Most High. But how could Cissy tell anyone about that? After fighting so long and so bitterly with Delia, how could she talk about any of that?

  Amanda’s God was not Cissy’s God. Amanda’s God counted sins and dealt out penance. Cissy’s God breathed righteousness and fire. Amanda’s God awarded fat babies and back porches. Cissy’s God was the pure risk of some impossible expiation—Jesus on the Cross or the body in extremis, the chance of redemption in the awful dark. Her God was a grin in the darkness, the agony that rode her shoulders when she swam so far her muscles gave out, the great jolt that went through her when Dede wrecked the Datsun. Every time Cissy changed over into her mud-heavy boots and old clothes for another trip underground, she felt the anticipation of another encounter with the mystery. Probably, she told herself, God had to hide in caves these days.

  In the dark anything seemed possible. Anything could be born there. The cave was a dim, curving stage full of unseen motion. In that dark Cissy was not Baptist or Pentecostal but surely beloved of God. The rocks waiting at Cissy’s feet made her think of falling, and falling did not scare her at all. Climbing shale required absolute concentration, putting the feet exactly right, moving slowly and never allowing a slip. Controlling her body that way made Cissy yearn to stand up, throw her arms wide, and shout out loud. And the act of not doing so created a sense of power held back, a constant tingling sensation at the nape of her neck. In the cave Cissy could feel what she might do, what might happen, her body hurtled against the stone walls, or the walls themselves coming down inexorably on her fragile flesh, pushing her up into God’s embrace, a mystery of darkness and glory. In the cathedral elegance of Little Mouth’s third chamber, Cissy lifted her head and felt a breeze whisper past her cheek. God or ghost, Clint or Randall, the sweating innocent dead or the burning terror of a lifelong desire. Someone climbed behind her, smelling of smoke and her daddy’s tequila. Someone ghostly and resentful coughed hollowly, whispered Delia’s name, and breathed on Cissy’s neck. Every echo wheezed. Every rockfall sounded a bass note. Jesus, magic, or death—anything was possible in a cave.

  Cissy moved through the cave like a woman in a dream, loving the sharp taste of her own fear when the rope slid across the rock surface, the steady, distant sound of water dripping, the heat of the other women’s sudden tempers. Every time Jean shouted at Mim, the rock would reverberate and Cissy would straighten her body to take that shout into her belly, to let it shake her inside and out. The beloved of God would shout like that, unhesitating and unafraid. Cissy opened her mouth and felt the echoes resound against her teeth. For their open, unafraid shouts, Cissy loved Jean and Mim completely. Love heated her blood, speeded her heart. For the first time in her life, she did not feel alone.

  Her family didn’t understand it, the usually reticent Cissy showing an interest in something besides books. Dede barely noticed, but Delia and Amanda found rare common ground in their concern over Cissy’s renewed enthusiasm for caving and her equally surprising friendship with those strange girls.

  “You’re always going somewhere or just back these days,” Delia said with a frown.

  “What you trying to prove?” Amanda demanded. “You never talk to us anymore.”

  As if I ever did, Cissy thought, but said nothing.

  Mim kicked roughly at the bundle of muddy clothes she had just stripped off after the third trip to Little Mouth. “Ugh. Red mud and yellow clay. Washing that out is going to be worse than washing Daddy’s dog.”

  Jean laughed. “I say we put them in that barrel in the backyard and just let water run through them for a day or two. We put them right in the machine, we’ll burn out the motor.”

  “Maybe use that sp
ray nozzle we got to wash the car.”

  “Yeah, that, or get the guys at the fire station to let us use theirs.”

  Cissy had nodded and laughed along with them. Talking about laundry and the sticky mud was part of the ritualized end of their expeditions. The jokes—the same ones told over and over, the same complaints—were a way to leave behind the concentrated exhilaration and fear of being underground. Laughter, nervous shaking, and slow relaxation—the aftermath of the expeditions was as predictable as the trips themselves were not. They did not talk about their claustrophobic terror or the appalling sound that skin made sliding across rock, or about the chafing of the helmet strap under the chin, or the way the slippery crawl spaces closed in around their shoulders, and the damp-rock smell clung to their clothes. Like drinking hot coffee and eating from discount bags of broken cookies, complaining about the filth of caving was a safe way of boasting of what they had done.