Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “It’s Floyd Collins,” Jean whispered. Mim giggled.

  Cissy put her hands in her armpits and grinned in the near dark. She’d found two books on the Floyd Collins story, though both were less about the poor Collins boy than about the circus that took place above the cave where he died. All the time he was shivering and starving down in the dark, his rescuers were drinking, picnicking, and selling souvenirs above him. The first time the three of them went down as a team, Mim had teased them about “doing a Floyd Collins.”

  “Don’t put your foot wrong. Don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

  Another crack echoed, and Cissy hugged herself tighter. She could imagine that pitiful ghost wandering eternally in the rocky reaches from Kentucky and Tennessee down through Georgia. It was a good-old-boy legend, a tale to scare the tenderhearted. Did you hear about old Floyd, famous Floyd Collins? He’s a limping echo behind your left ear; it’s harder now for him to get around without that left foot, but if you listen you can hear him stomping and stumbling along. He wants to pull at your shoulder, tell you his story, whisper about the reporters who dropped down notes that promised a glorious tombstone, a fortune for his daddy, anything for how it felt, dying in a hole while the world made a carnival above your corpse.

  “I’m famous,” he whispered, though no one spoke his name in daylight anymore. “I’m famous, and you could be too.”

  Cissy watched color bloom on the underside of her eyelids, imagining how he might have altered, the haunt-body moving over sand and rock. He would be so lithe, so essential. No bend or slope could hold him now. He needed no dynamite, no ax, no rope. A solid wall was not solid to old Floyd Collins. Dark was not dark. He could breathe around rock, swim through dirt. He led with his head, his mouth, his canine phosphorescent teeth. Dead but not gone, Floyd Collins lived in the wind. He breathed from the deep rock, was there in the stink of bone and bat shit and slow-settling dust. A legend. A threat. A joke that was never funny. People had to speak his name to outlive his fate, people who knew better than to go creeping into holes they did not know how to escape.

  Like Floyd, Cissy thought. If I get skinny enough, I’ll slide right through. How many calories does fear use? I’m scared enough to sweat off everything I ever was. And if I sweat enough, won’t I grease my passage? Could I slide right over these rocks and up into the light, become as lithe and essential as Floyd or memory or hope? Could I?

  “Cissy? Cissy! Are you all right?”

  “Fine, I’m fine.”

  “You were mumbling something.”

  Cissy shook her head. “Nothing, just thinking.”

  She looked in Mim’s direction. She could barely see the two girls in the dim glow of the one lamp. Were they truly lovers? Lord, she was stupid. Jean was breathing hard and the sound bounced off the sloping rock. There were broken edges of slate close above Mim’s face. The curve of the rock turned between them so that there was more space above Cissy. Reaching up, she could almost extend her arm straight out. She turned her head and followed the slope as it widened out into the darkness, the ground dropping down to what looked like sand, and the rock roof rising until she could not see how high it went. There was more room there, they might be able to stand up.

  Jean’s lamp dimmed again, so that the shadows seemed to be closing in. The only sound was their anguished breathing and the muted echo of water falling in the distance. Cissy held her breath for a moment, wishing that Jean would turn off the light and let them rest in the dark. If they were not moving, the dark felt perfectly safe to her, but she knew that Jean and Mim needed the light, that the dark was not comforting to them. It was only Cissy who was bothered by the light. It caught in the rough grade above her in such a way that the earth’s crust seemed to be moving.

  “Hallucination.” Cissy said the word carefully, and felt Mim shift closer to her until their hips touched.

  “Like an oasis in the desert.” It was as if Mim were reading Cissy’s mind.

  The bumps in the rock above Cissy were whitish gray and darker gray, damp in the weak light, like bubbles in meringue. Some of them had dimpled centers with drip points that looked like nipples. To Cissy’s dazzled vision the bubbles were warm breasts sweating in the cool, damp air. She was tempted to slide back up the slope to a spot where the gap narrowed so steeply that she could lie back at an angle and put her mouth to one of those bulges. She stared at the glistening center of the largest teat. She could imagine grainy syrup filling her mouth. That tit would sweat sweet. It would be like rock sugar.

  “Wouldn’t taste good,” Mim whispered into her left ear.

  “No,” Cissy laughed. “Was I talking out loud again?”

  “You been doing it for a while. And that’s limestone mud.” Mim pushed herself up a bit on the rock. “Limestone would be salty and sour. Don’t think about sugar. Think about getting out of here, about climbing up this passage and the one past it. Think about how close we are to the top. Think about staying warm.” ,

  Cissy turned to put her mouth near Mim’s ear. “It’s beautiful, though.” Her words were startlingly loud. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Her voice sounded fuzzy. Every syllable had a little burr added, a slight vibrato that echoed against the crags. “Look at the way the light plays over the stones, the way the water drops shine.”

  “Looks like ice being born.” Jean’s voice was rough with exhaustion, gravel under dust. “Ice babies looking for ice tits. No sugar. Frost.”

  “You that cold, Jean?” Mim’s voice was sharp with fear.

  “I’m freezing. I am just fucking freezing. My hands won’t stop shaking. Even my armpits are cold.” She cursed again, her voice lightening into something close to laughter. “If I could spit, I’d spit hailstones.”

  “Oh, honey.” Mim crawled over to rub Jean’s shoulders.

  “Oh, shit.” Jean started to giggle. “Don’t do that.”

  Cissy heard wet material dragging over clammy skin. She crawled toward the sound. Mim’s hands rubbed Jean’s skin where she had pulled open the layers of clothing. Jean’s laughter slowed and faded to soft protests.

  “Oh, honey,” she said in a teasing tone. “Don’t get me started.”

  “You got to get that wet shirt off.” Mim’s voice was grim.

  Cissy did not move. She didn’t want to have to be the one to do anything. It was enough just to be still and listen to them struggle, to hear the dull echoes of the walls all around them, to feel the thud of her own heartbeat.

  “Christ damn,” Jean swore. “Here I am freezing and you want me to get naked.”

  “Cissy! Come on,” Mim shouted. “Come help me.”

  Cissy sighed. She wasn’t sure exactly what Mim had in mind, but she was clearly the most alert of the three of them, and her tone was insistent. Cissy made herself slide across the slate grade to Jean’s side. When her hand touched Jean’s shoulder, the girl turned to her, laughing. Mim was pulling frantically at Jean’s clotted layers of filthy wet clothing.

  “Help me,” she said. “Come on. Help me.”

  “It’s too cold!” Jean’s voice was slurred with exhaustion.

  Hypothermia, Cissy realized. That’s what Mim is afraid of. Hypothermia could kill you in a cold, wet cave. She pushed Jean’s icy hands out of her way, carefully unbuttoning the flannel undershirt beneath the outer layer of denim.

  “We got to get this off!” Mim’s voice was almost hysterical.

  Jean’s light winked out. The dark was suddenly thick around them. Cissy did not hesitate. She clicked on her flashlight and wedged it in a crack in the rock so that it shone on the other two women. The angled light illuminated Mim and Jean perfectly, but it was the phosphorescent shine of Mim’s naked shoulder that shook Cissy out of her frozen passivity. Mim was half undressed, with her own undershirt wadded in one hand and scrubbing at Jean’s body. Jean’s shirt was pulled up to her neck and off one arm but still tangled around the other. Abruptly Jean started trying to help Mim drag her britches down, but her fingers
were thick and fumbling. Cissy crawled close and wedged her legs around Jean’s torso. She finished undoing the last buttons on the jeans, pulling several off completely when they caught in the heavy wet fabric.

  “I can do it. I can do it.” Jean was still reaching for the flannel shirt as it was being pulled over her head.

  “Everything off. Everything off.” Mim’s voice sounded strained with her effort not to stutter with the chill.

  “Right.” ,

  Cissy worked the last layer off Jean’s upper body. The gray-blue shirt slid off Jean’s head in a soggy heap. Little pinpricks of goose bumps dimpled Jean’s blue-white skin in the awkward light. Icy prickles shot up Cissy’s midriff in sympathy at the sight. Immediately Mim was at Jean’s left side, pushing her back into Cissy’s braced thighs, scrubbing furiously at Jean’s exposed flesh. Jean blinked sleepily and struggled weakly.

  “Don’t fight,” Mim insisted. “Lie back.”

  “Tell me what to do.” Jean’s demand was spoken in the voice of a petulant, exhausted child.

  “Help me.” Mim was growing more desperate as Jean’s shivering increased. Cissy tried to scrub at Jean’s back and look around at the same time. The slight grade they were resting on sloped down to meet another layer of rock. Just ahead there was that shine of some white reflective surface. Sand, she had seen it before. It looked like sand. Abruptly Cissy pulled free of Jean’s shivering body and grabbed the flashlight to shine the beam in the direction of the white glow.

  “That’s sand!” She started pulling Jean with her before Mim realized what she was doing.

  “Tell me what to do,” Jean said again. “Just tell me what to do. I can’t think. Just tell me.”

  “Here, here.”

  Cissy pulled Jean along the rock, dragging the wads of damp clothes with them. Mim was falling and weeping but climbing down with them, still holding on to Jean’s shoulder with one hand as if she could not bear to lose contact with her. Cissy pushed Jean ahead of her onto the sand surface, ignoring the girl’s squeals as the rough silt abraded her tender belly and thighs. Roughly Cissy shoved Mim to the other side so that they sandwiched Jean between them. Then she began again the coarse scrubbing motions with the filthy clothes. When Mim joined in and began to scrub Jean’s other side, the girl’s squeals became sobs.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Mim crooned. “This is going to help. We’re going to warm you up. Oh, baby, we got to warm you up.”

  Cissy scrubbed hard, rocking her whole body against Jean’s passive one. Gradually the exercise began to warm her as well, but it was fool’s heat, adding another layer of sweat to her skin. The damp would invite more chill. Deliberately she scooped sand over herself, adding another layer of insulation. Her body felt both tremendously heavy and gossamer-thin at the same time, as if her substance were evaporating with her efforts.

  “Scrub,” she shouted, no longer sure she was talking to anyone but herself. “Rub harder. Come on.”

  Mim scrubbed harder, briskly massaging Jean while Cissy left them to crawl over and drag back the packs. They had one remaining layer of dry clothing. The maps were wrapped in plastic covers. That was what they needed, paper to make another insulating layer. She used the map case and then some small plastic bags. She split those, spreading them out. That gave Jean one dry layer beneath the outer layer of wet clothing. It was a pity to pull apart the maps, but there was no way around it. They needed every bit of heat they could manage, every layer they could add.

  With Jean in the shape she was, they did not have as many hours as they had hoped. They had to crawl and climb without stopping. If they stopped, they would die, all of them down here in the cold and dark. For a moment Cissy considered. Would she leave them if she had to do it to get out? Could she? If it came down to it, would she leave Jean in Mim’s embrace and crawl out on her own? I might, Cissy thought. If I have to, I might. I want to live. I want to get out of here alive.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Mim whispered into Jean’s tousled hair. “You’re going to be fine. Just fine, baby.”

  Cissy prodded Mim. “We got to get going.”

  “She needs rest.” Mim sounded as if she wanted to cry.

  “Listen to me.” Cissy put her lips up close to Mim’s cheek. She dug her fingers into Mim’s arm. “This is like being in a blizzard. It’s like taking a nap in a snowdrift. She can’t nap. We can’t lie down. We have to move and keep moving.”

  “Please, Mim,” Jean whimpered. “Just let me warm up.”

  “You won’t warm up.” Cissy felt as if her shoulders were tightening into iron posts. An iron core went up her spine from her tailbone to her brain. She was all ice and metal and cold determination. “You will die,” she said, and heard Delia’s accent in her own. Delia had talked like that when she had dragged them all the way across the country. She had pushed and prodded and forced Cissy to do what had seemed like sheer craziness. It had not mattered that Cissy hated her for it. It had not mattered that there had been no reason to believe they were going somewhere safe.

  “She’s right,” Mim said, pulling at Jean’s body. “Oh, honey, she’s right.”

  Mim pushed up onto her own knees and pulled Jean with her. Cissy reached over and grabbed Jean’s belt. “Get up. Come on and get up,” she shouted.

  Weeping, Jean crawled up until she was kneeling beside Mim. “I hate you,” she said. She could have been speaking to either of them. It made Cissy feel light-headed to hear her say it. She smiled and her lips cracked as her mouth pulled wide.

  “I hate you too,” Cissy said. “I hate this rock and this sand and God and Georgia and the ghost of goddamned Floyd Collins, but I am not going to die down here. And as long as I can make you crawl, neither are you.”

  Cissy turned her body so that she could reach Jean more easily. She looped a loose piece of the rope she still had wrapped around her middle through the woman’s belt. Then she rolled around again and started crawling forward. She heard Mim moan and Jean cry out as the rope jerked and pulled her forward. It was harder still, crawling forward that way, dragging the reluctant and weeping woman behind her. Mim followed behind, sometimes cursing when she bumped her head against Jean.

  Cissy paid no attention to the girls behind her except to kick at them when they stopped. She had a clear picture in her mind now. She knew exactly what she had to do, how far she had to crawl, how many times she would have to roll over and slide along on her back. This passage was lit up in her memory. It was the way out.

  “Come on,” she called back over her shoulder to Jean and Mim. “This is it. It’s the way out, I know it.”

  “You don’t know nothing.”

  “Oh yes I do.” Cissy scraped a line of dirt off her neck where her collar was rubbing a raw spot. “I know this part. I know where we have to go. If you don’t come after me, I’ll leave you to rot down here.”

  One of them sobbed and the other cursed. Cissy did not bother to see who did what or to speak. The rope tied to her belt loop pulled taut and then slackened. They were following. That was all that was important. If they kept moving, none of them had to die down here.

  “I hate you,” one of them said in a hoarse, unrecognizable voice, and Cissy, still crawling forward, laughed out loud.

  “Sure you do,” she said, “sure you do.” Light-headed and exhilarated, Cissy kept giggling to herself as she crawled stubbornly upward. The color of the sandy loam beneath her was buttermilk. The shale above was as dusty as a raven’s wing. Her pulse was pounding a steady cardinal, her breath was sky blue. Randall was singing somewhere behind her right shoulder, “born on the corner of Calvary and Nazareth, but I an’t gonna lay me down and die.” No Daddy, Cissy promised. If Delia could drag me so far, I can damn sure pull these bitches up out of a hole in the ground.

  When they finally found the Day-Glo paint splashes three hours later, Cissy was shaking with exhaustion, but her head was clear and her thoughts as smooth as ball bearings on a greased surface. Venice Beach, she t
hought, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, UCLA California, and all those places I don’t even remember anymore. I can go there if I want.

  “Daddy,” Cissy whispered when the morning sunlight fell on her face. “Daddy, I’m going to go back. I’m not going to die here. I’m going to find out what I can do.”

  “Oh God,” Mim sobbed behind her. Her face was bruised and streaked with mud. She climbed up into the light on her hands and knees. “That’s the last time, the last time I ever do that in this life.”

  “Oh, you don’t know what you’ll do,” Cissy told her. She was stumbling with exhaustion but full of happy exhilaration. “We don’t none of us know what we might do.”

  Cissy looked back down past Jean’s sodden, mud-encrusted body. The gaping mouth of Paula’s Lost was half obscured by a sweeping hang of kudzu vines. “I don’t think I can map the passage,” she said. “We found it, but I don’t think I could show anybody the way. An’t that a hoot!”

  Chapter 23

  Delia sat in the coffee shop waiting for Emmet Tyler. There was a new waitress, a long-faced woman wearing a poorly styled wig. Delia kept looking at the wig, the way it fell around the woman’s face and the constant small motions she kept making to adjust it. I could fix that, Delia thought, and realized she had been comparing it to Amy Tyler’s wig, the one she had styled so long ago.

  “God,” she said softly. She had drunk too much coffee. She didn’t think she could stand another cup.

  “Did you hear anything from Emmet?” Cissy slid into the booth across from Delia. The scrapes on her face looked pink and raw, the knuckles of her right hand were bandaged, but her eyes were bright and clear.

  “He an’t been in yet,” Delia said.