More time ticked away as he shuddered, his body moving quick and shallow, more an expression of discomfort than anything else. The whir and click seemed quieter, slower. She stood, willing patience, and she thought she heard the machine skip a beat.
But she heard something else, too. The wind—the night air—was speaking. It reminded her of when she was a child and she’d fallen asleep on the couch while Aunt Fern and Lou were talking, a conversation that seemed so far away, wrapped in cotton. How crazy, to think suddenly of her aunt Fern’s couch and Lou and Aunt Fern sitting at the kitchen table, Aunt Fern drinking coffee and Lou doing a crossword puzzle, even at a young age. Crazy how Lucy Maud could now remember the nap of the couch, the marled green stripe on the white background, remembered it on her cheek, even, her face pressed into the couch pillow, her legs tucked underneath her. The wind—it sounded so much like Lou and Aunt Fern—and then, when Kevin turned to her, wide eyes revealing that he heard it, too, she realized that it was.
2:15 A.M.
Carla, clean, exhausted, sprawled on borrowed sheets, dreamed of snakes in spirals. Sleeping in a room full of other sleepers, she came to rest for a time. Rain now on the roof of the long house, soothing for those inside. The long exhale of night, and Carla—now smiling, now frowning—wrapped in night’s coil.
2:17 A.M.
Of course Boyd ran. She had let herself be led too far down the ghosts’ path. She didn’t know what it meant—the sudden eye contact or where Caleb’s parents had been headed—but she knew that something had almost gotten her and she wasn’t clear yet.
When she looked back, stumbling over granite outcrops, she saw the lantern light dancing over the stones, moving not only closer but swinging from side to side, as if the lantern lurched in the woman’s unsteady hand, as if she was traveling at great speed.
Boyd didn’t know where she was running, except that she was running away. She knew that it was just a matter of time before she fell, and what would they do if they caught her?
She came down from higher ground and found herself in a grove of Ashe juniper, the needles underneath her feet muffling all sound. It was cooler here, almost solemn. The air smelled fresher, too: green, like mowed grass. She didn’t see the light for some time, but she kept running, though the moon was little help here in this grove.
After a minute, the thought came to her that she had lost them. What were they, anyway, but traces left in the world? Did they have agency or consciousness or will? The ability to hurt her? She was out of breath and exhausted, and she thought of sitting down, but how could she do that now? How would she not expect a hand on her shoulder as soon as she fell asleep?
She would have to keep going until dawn, until she saw the east cresting pink and gold, until she saw the clouds pearled with the yellow sun. She didn’t know how long that would be; she’d lost all sense of time, and when she thought about it, she decided that dawn should have been hours ago. She had been living in this night forever.
But this grove of juniper was peaceful, quiet and still and sheltered, and she sensed an openness beyond the arc of trees. The ground was even dryer here, the trees absorbing much of the rain. How easy would it be to sit down?
A breath. Two. Her next few steps took her to the edge of the grove, and she suddenly understood that sense of emptiness—the ground sheared off here into open space, and she could not see the bottom, only the moonlit tops of more juniper trees, maybe twenty feet below her. It might as well have been a thousand; she could see no safe passage down.
She’d felt a sickening exposure throughout the night, a realization of fragility, a sense that what she had believed about the world before the storm was not quite right. The world felt red in tooth and claw, hungry. But, too, she remembered that after the storm, the garden had welcomed her, and she had lain on the rows between the beds and decided not to leave, and she wondered if these two things were essentially the same thing. The earth wore different faces, but it wanted her in whatever way it could get her. It sent her its ghosts, and its river fingers, and its tomatoes that had tasted like flesh, and now she found herself deep in the night, essentially alone. Fear overtook her, a cold clenching of the throat, and she began to cry silently.
Now came the swaying light, after she had imagined she’d outrun it. What would happen when they caught up to her, when they both closed cold fingers around her arms? She looked out over that open space. Behind her, the glow was dim, but it was getting closer. It was just a matter of time.
When the light was close enough that Boyd imagined it was at the edge of the grove, she turned, prepared to see the couple in the distance, the woman leading the way with the lantern.
The man was right in front of her. He could touch her if he only lifted his arm. Worse, his face was blurry, smudged with a giant thumb, erased until almost blank.
Now things happened as if underwater, a slow-motion and breathless series of acts. He raised his hand and disturbed the air around her face, but he couldn’t quite reach her. She stepped backward, tripping over an outcrop of limestone. The woman was beside him now, having covered thirty yards in a gliding heartbeat, her mouth open, her eyes streaming tears.
Boyd went down, with two ghosts above her. They pushed forward and she closed her eyes and stepped into the open air, not entirely by accident.
She hung in the night, staring at the stars, garments fluttering up around her, and it was almost as if she were weightless. The lantern light telescoped away until it, too, seemed a star. As she fell, she thought about Isaac in the tree, and how he had finally needed her, and the girl in the bed, how she was there but not there, and about the person Boyd believed was out there who would understand Boyd for what she was. Her mom and dad and the way they’d held hands in Aunt Fern’s storm shelter.
In a second she was through the canopy and in the dark again. She landed on her back, stunned, the breath knocked out of her, but alive and sunk in a bed of juniper and pine, and the needles disturbed by her impact settled around and over her, until they formed their own sort of blanket, surprisingly thick. She was unhurt and covered, and the terror she had felt upon seeing that smudged face left her in a surge of relief. She could feel how violently her heart beat in her chest.
But after a moment, underneath the needles, she breathed. The light that filtered down faded, and the needles above her were not disturbed. Caleb’s parents could not reach her. She did not move for some time, her breath coming more slowly, more regularly. The earth had made a bed for her and she slept.
2:20 A.M.
Isaac, finally at rest, the moon upon his face. His tree companions were also sleeping, unwilling and wary bedmates. The pecan tree was a palm outstretched, a haven in the storm.
All over the Hill Country, the trees had taken in travelers, like medieval monasteries opening doors. A pause here while the night wound on. The eye of the storm.
2:25 A.M.
Allen Potivar was beginning to wheeze. He pulled out his inhaler, puffed twice, then put it back into his shirt pocket, patting it after it was deposited.
Lucy Maud hesitated, torn between wanting to take him back and wanting to find her sister and her aunt. He’d said an hour; there was at least half that yet. How long would it take them to get back to the house?
But the voices, Lou’s and Aunt Fern’s, the sound of the wind talking, a lighthearted bickering, though Lucy Maud knew Lou didn’t like to argue with Aunt Fern anymore, didn’t see the point to it. They were together at least, she thought as her step quickened, as she pushed past Allen Potivar and realized that they weren’t on any particular path and had just been heading a certain direction. She would never make it back to the road without him, not in the dark. Let him go back rather than die, of course; she’d make Aunt Fern and Lou sit right down and wait until morning. The light would eventually come, and while this seemed like the middle of nowhere, it was settled land and, well, somebody would come find them. She slid on a rock in her haste and quickly caught herself.
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Now she heard a man’s voice in between the two women’s. She glanced back at Allen, but she couldn’t read his expression in this dim light. It was Ruben King; she knew it was Ruben King. What other fool would be out on a night like this?
As she moved forward, clouds in front of the moon shifted. The same wind that had carried the voices now revealed two figures on the ground.
Lou was kneeling, bending down as if shouting into a manhole, and Lucy Maud realized that the manhole was Allen Potivar’s mine shaft. Lou’s hair hung around her face, and Lucy Maud thought for a second that no middle-aged woman should have hair that long, especially not when it was so shot through with gray. Behind Lou, Fern lay sprawled on the ground, face and palms turned up to the brief flash of moonlight. Lucy Maud heard her voice now, singing softly—“Skinna marink a dink a dink, skinna marink a do. I. Love. You”—a song from Lucy Maud’s childhood, carried to her now not across the thirty yards or so separating them but across the forty years between what they all were then and what they all were now. Lucy Maud felt a heaviness at her forehead, and she pressed her fingertips there—good Lord, had they all been those people once? Aunt Fern had cared for Lucy Maud and Lou when their parents had not been around, and though Lucy Maud thought of her mother with a sense of heartbreak and loss, it was with Aunt Fern that both girls had bonded. Those days—hard to think of them now because there had been such a possibility to their lives, so many things they should have done and been, so many ways that they should have loved and been loved. Such a lump in Lucy Maud’s throat, so that she couldn’t even swallow.
This same wind now took the clouds and piled them before the moon, damping the light again. Lou and Fern faded into blackness, but Lucy Maud still heard Fern’s song. She stumbled forward, picking her way down the incline, and behind her, she heard footsteps and the oxygen condenser, but those things were falling behind.
The man’s voice responded to something Lou said, and what a strange feeling for Lucy Maud to have Ruben King intrude upon her childhood like this. His tone was quiet, calm, as was Lou’s, and it sounded like the sort of conversation a husband has with a wife in bed, just before sleep. Did you remember to pay …? You’ll never guess who I ran into today … Have you seen the …? I can’t find it, as if Ruben King weren’t stuck in a mine shaft, and Lucy Maud felt an unreasonable stab of jealousy at how intimate it all sounded.
Fern, singing on the ground, sat up. “Here comes little Lucy Maud. Told you.” Then she lay back down. “I wonder if a person could count the stars.”
Almost to them and afraid of tripping in the dark, Lucy Maud nevertheless looked up. The sky was clouded: not a star was visible. Fern was in another night, as she often was these days, a night that had come before, plus stars, minus clouds.
Lou was on her feet. “Jesus, what took you so long?” It was hard to pick out any detail in the darkness, but Lucy Maud could see a wild gesturing of arms.
Lucy Maud faltered. Lou was not usually the one to yell and demand answers, and Lucy Maud was not usually the one to apologize. “I—I didn’t know where you were. I’ve been trying to find you.”
“I can’t take care of all of this by myself, Lucy Maud! Fern isn’t even Fern half the time, and now this asshole’s stuck in a hole in the ground.”
Lucy Maud heard an indignant exhale from the hole.
“We have been trying to find you. This whole time, we’ve been wandering up and down the road.”
“We weren’t ever even on the road. Fern took off into the countryside.” Lou’s head swiveled, looking past Lucy Maud. Allen Potivar and Kevin had caught up. “Oh, hello,” Lou said, torn between frustration and the need to use good manners.
Fern, still on her back, said, “I didn’t take off into the countryside. I heard somebody stuck in the ground. He’s been down there for a long time.”
Lucy Maud drew her chin back in surprise. “Just since this afternoon, right?”
“No. For ages.” Fern shook her head, a denial that vaguely spooked Lucy Maud, but there was no time to figure out what Fern meant. Allen, tears now streaming from the outer corners of his eyes, half sat, half fell to the ground next to Fern.
The rain, which had been heavy in the air since they left the road, started again, the clouds unzipping like a seam. Fern raised her palms to catch the drops, but Allen, chin shaking, let out a thin moan.
“We have to get you back,” Lucy Maud said.
Allen, tears of fear and frustration making inroads in the lines of his cheeks, nodded.
“Kevin,” Lucy Maud said. “You need to take Allen back.”
Kevin pointed to himself. “Me?”
She tilted her head. “Who else?”
He considered. “Well, I thought you would do it. You’re the only one who could find the way back.”
Her mouth fell open, though she didn’t know if he saw. And what would he do? She’d come back and he’d be on the ground next to Fern, looking at the nonvisible stars. Lou would still be shouting down into a hole.
“Kevin, take him back. If you don’t feel comfortable, stay at his house with him. Lord knows we don’t need another lost person wandering around.” Lucy Maud thought of all of them out here, loose in the night. “In the morning, call the police. They won’t come out here tonight. If they could even find us.”
Kevin hesitated. After a minute he said, “Okay.” She imagined him thinking of a couch and television, of a refrigerator full of food. He and Allen asleep, Kevin on the velvet couch, Allen in the recliner, Andy Griffith or Gunsmoke on the television.
“Kevin, you have to make sure he gets there. If he struggles, carry him. He only has a quarter of an hour or so.”
“Carry him?”
“Carry him. A fireman’s carry. A piggyback ride. Make sure he gets back and plugs in his condenser.” Lucy Maud turned to Allen. “Go on.” She gestured toward Kevin with her chin.
Kevin and Allen started back toward the house, Kevin swinging the unlit flashlight. “Wait,” she said, and took it. “None of us are using it, but I bet it’s dark in that mine.”
Kevin let out a little breath, indignant and in disbelief, but she didn’t give it back.
“If you come back, bring another one. I’d light a fire, but—” She looked at the sky and drops fell on her face.
Flashlight-less, Kevin and Allen disappeared over the ridge. Lucy Maud, with Lou next to her, watched them go. She imagined them during that long walk back, silent except for the condenser, two tiny beings loose in the great world.
Lucy Maud turned back to the scene in front of her: two women lying down, the hole in the ground. Fern still singing to herself. Lucy Maud nodded at Lou and went to the shaft, kneeling and shining the light down.
The shaft was deep, more like a well, and adding to the well impression was the standing water at the bottom of it. She saw Ruben King perched on a limestone boulder off to one side, an island in that underground lake, but she could not see the floor of the mine. She had no idea how deep the water was.
“Hi, Ruben,” she said, as if they’d run into each other at H-E-B. “You find Maximilian’s treasure?”
He covered his eyes with his forearm, unused to the light. “I don’t think so.” His tone was tired, disappointed. “But we did find something.” His knees were tucked up almost to his chin, and he lifted his right hand. In it was a single silver ingot, already formed and, even underneath the tarnish, glittering in the flashlight’s beam.
She looked at that ingot for a moment, and at the miserable wet man who held it. His posture revealed that he was exhausted, and they still had to find a way for him to climb out. “There any more of those where that came from?”
He was quiet. “A few for sure.” After a minute, he said, “I haven’t done much looking around.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. There’s no light, there’s all this water, and then there’s …” He looked at something she couldn’t see. “There’s—there’s this guy down here.”
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br /> She fell to her stomach and dangled the arm with the flashlight. “There’s somebody else down there?”
He nodded, eyes fixed on something she still could not see. “Yep. Or there was. At one point. Maybe a hundred years ago. He—he didn’t make it.”
She angled the flashlight but saw nothing. “A skeleton?”
Silence as Ruben considered. “Yes. I mean, there’s clothes still.”
“Anything in his pockets? Do you know who he is?” She didn’t know why she asked this. There would be no record of this man; he was absolutely forgotten.
Ruben looked up and gave her a half smile, embarrassed. “I’m not touching his pockets. I wish I didn’t have to look at him.” But look at him he did, and he told Lucy Maud what he saw. “His clothes are wet, ripped. The skin on his hands is totally gone; that’s all skeleton. He has no eyes, but there’s something on his cheeks, something that looks like skin. Would there still be skin?”
She leaned farther until she almost fell in the hole, but she still could see nothing. “I have no idea.”
“It’s pretty dark down here.” She thought he was hinting that she should toss the flashlight down. But what if she needed it for Fern and Lou? She said nothing.
After a minute, Ruben said, “The thing is—”
She waited until she couldn’t stand it any longer. “The thing is what?”
He exhaled, grappling with how to say whatever he wanted to say. “I keep—I keep trying to figure out how he died. Starvation, maybe? Just being stuck and unable to get out?” He looked up at her, and she knew he was thinking that might be his fate.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 19