“Maybe.” How would one climb out of this mine shaft? The wall was concave, something impossible to scale.
“But—” He cupped his chin in his hand, considering, looking back at the skeleton that she could not see, and she knew that in these matters he was far more of an expert than anyone else she ever knew. “But—he’s upside down. His head is on the ground, his feet up on the wall. He looks surprised more than anything else.” Ruben shook his head, still looking at the man. “He wouldn’t have done this himself. An animal, maybe?” He looked farther back into the mine, another area Lucy Maud couldn’t see. “I just keep thinking, ‘What else is in here with me? What is biding its time, just waiting to come out?’ ”
The rain fell into the mine shaft, but she thought he was sheltered where he was. “We’re going to get you out.” But she didn’t know how. “It won’t be night forever.” It was meant to comfort him, but she wasn’t entirely sure. Beside her, Aunt Fern had moved on to “Danny Boy,” and Lucy Maud almost told her to stop singing because it sounded so much like a dirge.
3:00 A.M.
Just below a juniper grove, just past where the cliff sheared off and the land fell away, not two miles from the mine shaft, the lantern light was gone. A wind stole through, lifting needles, a breath of the late night, getting on to morning. The trees breathed, too, and the earth. Rain fell outside the grove, but the juniper sealed its little world, keeping the ground dry.
In the dim, a sleeve trailed, pale pink cotton with buttons in the shapes of cat’s head. Below the blouse was a pair of blue jeans, no-nonsense Levi’s that blended into the dark. The blouse and jeans glided forward, as on a mobile clothesline. The shoe underneath, though—one Nike, a running shoe that had seen better days—took steps, walking solemnly forward like a windup toy. The footfalls were silent, the only sound the earthbound respiration. In. Out. In.
The garments stopped at a rectangular depression in the earth. Was it a grave? It was recent, convex not concave. The blouse bent forward, the jeans crumpled at nonexistent knees, the legs and sleeves deflated, a sighing motion toward the earth. The clothes fluttered to the ground, bits of straw stuck in the fabrics, while the one shoe came to rest next to them.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
What Those Rains Were Like
It’s hard to tell you what it was like during and after those rains. Hard to explain the damage a flood can do. The whole world was like a snow globe, shaken and settled; things come to rest where they were never meant to be. Imagine finding the contents of your house in the trees. Look around. The bookshelves, emptied and splintered upon the rocks. The books, pages and spines turgid, disintegrating into the wilderness. Televisions and game consoles and cords like a new breed of snake. Broken china and mangled aluminum pans. Pencils and earrings and athletic socks and LEGOs. The wrought iron bench from your front porch stuck in the creek half a mile down the road, paint flecking into the mud, too heavy to move. Wrought iron beds, too, and sheets twisting in branches, the roots of everything exposed. In every canebrake, in every place where the debris caught, were tree roots, shocked to find themselves in open air.
3:05 A.M.
In a house three miles east of the juniper grove, a girl who hadn’t risen in years stirred. Her mother was downstairs, sleeping on a sofa that was being overtaken by vines. Grass grew on the parlor floor, and vines pulled at the walls. They had nearly wrested the kitchen from the side of the house.
In her sleep, the mother’s hand fell to the floor, sweeping over the grass, and more grass quickly sprouted between her fingers, in the space between index and thumb. The vines coming in under the door sprouted heart-shaped leaves the color of limes. Now, eyes looked in the window: yellow with a vertical pupil. The wild wanted in. There was no more safety here than there was out there. This place was the wilderness; it was the same. Soon the roof would crack open, the moonlight permitted entry. Soon the chimney would crumble into the ground. In the barn, the sleeping girl’s horse, unridden now for years, leaving U-shaped hoofprints that will ossify as the mud dries, but now the horse stamps in the dark, sensing something not right. The stable, faded board and batten, would disintegrate under the weight of the natural world, would stagger and then fall, all of that timber carried from somewhere, settling into the Texas earth.
But now, the girl who hadn’t moved in years moved. The index finger of her left hand tapped the bedsheet; the eyelids quivered, then opened. Cloudy pupils, the eyes gone to cream, the same color as the fingernails that now gripped the hospital blanket. Toes stretched underneath the sheet, big toes reaching, remembering what it was like to move. With a rolling motion of the head, the neck awakened, the awakening continuing in a wave down the length of the spine. The girl’s tongue curled upward in a yawn. A shoulder arched, then the other. Legs bent at the knee, the thin blanket gathering into a pool and then flowing to the ground like so much water. The girl moved slow thighs.
The feet, ponderous, heavy things, were on the floor now. The eyes had fully opened; were her mother awake, she would be surprised by the gray iris. When the eyes had last closed—on a rainy night in a December long past—the iris had been brown with flecks of green. If the mother were awake, she would remember the phone call in the middle of the night, the quick trip to the hospital in Marble Falls, the long stay while everybody decided what to do next, the two years at a residential facility. She would remember the move home, the hospital bed placed in the upstairs room, the quick training she had done, the catheters, the IV bag, the novels read in the heat and dust of late afternoon. She would remember her own loud barks of laughter, sudden and surprising, when she had forgotten she was reading Terms of Endearment or The Phantom Tollbooth, and the sound of her own voice acting without her command had pulled her back to the Texas afternoon, to her own daughter, trapped, mind and body no longer in communication. She would remember the times she wondered what had happened to the rest of the royal court, to the people who hadn’t been pricked by the spinning wheel, whether they had aged and died while Sleeping Beauty slept on.
Now the girl’s left hand unhooked herself from the apparatus keeping her alive; she no longer needed it. The hospital gown floated open at the back. She knew what she was doing with the medical equipment: How? Her fingers unhooked, untapped, slid the needle out. Blood dripped and flowered on the floor. Her movements were confident but exaggerated, her fingers overextended, lovely shapes despite the off-color nails. The wind on her face, in her red hair, the same wind that brushed an empty shirt on a mound of juniper needles, the same moonlight that crawled over faces sleeping in a second-story common room, the same air that followed the whir and click of two men walking home in the dark and three women kneeling over a hole in the ground. It snaked around a Noah’s ark of a pecan tree, snuck into a house with a burned spot on the floor and a lingering smell of sage, rifled through a campsite by the lake where panning equipment and books swollen with rain lay in disarray inside a sodden tent.
This wind, this moonlight—they were part and parcel, the same—animated a girl nobody thought would ever rise again. Even her mother, somehow suspended in time, believed the night would go on without them, but now the night had come calling.
Here, now, the girl answered, stepping out of the room for the first time in years, feeling the creak of rusty parts, the knee unaccustomed to its bend, the ball and socket of shoulders unaccustomed to the swing of arms.
What did those gray eyes see? We cannot yet know. How was the world when last Angie Mason walked? Who was in charge and what did they do? Banks were collapsing, as was the market. It had been a leap year that started on a Tuesday, an election year. The things she would not know, mind and body severed so, and for so long. She would not know of the airplane that had come to rest on the river, passengers lined on wings in the water. She would not know of the deep-water leak in the Gulf, or the new princess across the ocean, or the tsunami that had melted the nuclear reactors. That year, an ancient calendar
had ticked down, and people who had never followed it were suddenly convinced that the absence of ancient time meant that our time, too, was spooling out. No. There was still some time left. We were now so far into the future that we were inconceivable to those ancients; only think of them imagining us, imagining the world at the end of their allotted time. Impossible. This world would persist yet a little while.
All of these things Angie Mason did not know. She walked through the hallway, head straight, gaze not falling upon her mother growing mossy upon the parlor sofa. Hand on the doorknob, turning, delicate bones arching at the wrist. The door swung open, and she stepped past the bridle and tack on the front porch, leather beginning to rot, and she stepped on the two stairs, already collapsing in the middle. The black dog watched her but did not rise. Her head was empty of a swath of history, oh, but full of so much more: of the spin of the earth, of the dust of planets.
She did not know about this rain, about the bridge that was out and the houses that had floated away. Another storm was in her head, even more devastating, a swirl of wind and salt, a scouring of coast in no one’s memory but her own.
Stones pressed into her soles, tender from years in a bed, but Angie Mason didn’t flinch. The night air brushed against her bare back, but she was not cold. She raised her face to the stars as she walked, all of those books her mother had read still in the deep recesses of her brain. Clouds were in front of the stars and then not, and she had not yet returned to herself.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
We Loved This Place
We loved the canyons, the limestone, the smell of the creeks in spring. The trees that had stood for centuries. The very ground we walked on.
3:15 A.M.
Lucy Maud knelt at a hole in the ground and dangled a flashlight. The beam of light glanced off the limestone, chalky but not slick, and came to rest in the murky water pooled at the bottom. She could not tell how deep; without thinking she picked up a stone and dropped it. The shine of the surface broke—a small plunk—and the rock disappeared without revealing anything about the water’s depth.
“How deep is it?” she shouted.
Ruben King, resting on the limestone outcrop, knees drawn tight, chin tilted up toward her, shrugged. “A few feet.” She had thought the water was still; now, looking more closely, she imagined that it pulsed. Nothing disturbed the surface, she realized, but something was disturbing the body of it. After a minute, she thought she could see the surface almost burgeoning, the water doming as more was added to it from a source Lucy Maud was not able to discern. “If you stood in it, would your head be above water?”
“For now.”
She could only see him when she shone the flashlight directly on him. His face was tired, the light catching in the hollows underneath his eyes, in the ridges of his forehead. Well, they were all getting old, weren’t they? She’d hate to see what she would look like in a similar situation, trapped in the bottom of a mine shaft. The overhead light alone would age her twenty years. Even the usurper grad student would look terrible.
The thought made Lucy Maud smile, but she didn’t hate the grad student. She had been young once; she understood Kevin’s appeal, especially when he’d become Dr. Montgomery, intense and intent, reading Greek with one finger running along the words, spectacles slipping down his nose. When had he become this man? Lucy Maud had helped create him.
Now she looked down at Ruben King and thought she saw traces of her husband there, a sort of flicker of bone structure. God, what longing she felt, looking down the mine shaft, such a raw need to spend the love she had saved up inside her.
Clearly they needed a rope, and she wished she had told Kevin. She reached into her pocket and fished out her phone. But, no—Kevin wouldn’t be back at Allen’s house yet—what good would calling him do?
She should have sent Lou and Aunt Fern back with them, too. Now she felt responsible for all three of them, and Lou was—well, Lou had the potential to be less than helpful, more in the way.
“How did you get down there?” Lucy Maud asked Ruben. “Any chance of you climbing back out?”
He looked up to see if she was serious and then laughed. “You think I haven’t tried that already?” He waved a hand toward the thing Lucy Maud couldn’t see. “You think this guy hasn’t tried it?”
“But you climbed down, right? You didn’t just fall down this shaft?”
“I climbed down the first part. Fifteen feet or so. Then the room down here opens and I just dropped. That’s about ten feet above me.” He shifted, wanting to move but unwilling to put his feet back in the water. “If I could just get back up there—”
Lucy Maud sat back on her heels and looked at the clouded sky. Boyd and Isaac who knew where, and now this man. There was nothing she could do, and there was never nothing she could do. She was, above all other things, a doer. She could climb down, but then Lou and Fern would be adrift, and she would just be stuck at the bottom of a hole in the ground. She could walk Lou and Fern back to Allen’s house—assuming she could find it—then come back with Kevin and a rope, again assuming she could find the mine shaft. But something stopped her. She felt that if she walked away from Ruben, the hole would become a grave, and she would come back to find Ruben and walk right past this place, and in a year his bones would be rattling around with the other poor guy’s. She thought of all of those afternoons that Boyd had been at Ruben and Isaac’s house, that year in seventh grade when Boyd’s final Texas History grade had been 100.
“Ruben, I don’t know how to get you out.”
He laughed, though it wasn’t funny. “That’s okay. Unless you have a rope or a ladder, I don’t imagine you could.”
Lucy Maud adjusted so that she was flat on her stomach, her arm swinging the flashlight. “Do you want me to toss this down to you?”
“Sure.”
She had visions of missing, of the flashlight sinking into the water, irretrievable. But Ruben caught it, and then she had a vision of André the Giant catching Robin Wright at the end of The Princess Bride. As the light had fallen, she’d imagined harp music.
He took the light and shined it back into the passage. She could no longer see his face. Then he switched it off to save the battery. “Do you have a phone with you?”
“Yes.” Being prone was making her sleepy.
“Okay, good. In the morning, we’ll call someone with a ladder, I guess.”
She imagined carrying a ladder half a mile across gravel. “Or a rope.”
“Um.” Light shone on the walls of the shaft. She knew he was imagining scaling that wall, and she understood why he was worried. She doubted if she could do it, but then, she wouldn’t have crawled into that hole in the first place.
Gravel bit through her clothes, but she settled in, the fatigue of the long night getting to her. Little was out here to stop the wind, but it was gentle, drifting over Fern, now asleep on the ground. Lou had tucked up her knees and wrapped her arms around them as if she was cold, the wind running over the cedar brake that had hidden the hole in the ground. The wind carried on it the knowledge of the flood, and the entire world was wet. How had they all—all of them—ended up out here? What in the storm had set them to wandering?
“I always thought about how Boyd and Isaac became friends.” Ruben’s voice was slow, in the mood to talk, not ready to go to sleep just yet. He didn’t wait for a reply. “I’m glad they did, because I would have wondered what happened to her after she left school. A bright one, Boyd. And I don’t mean smart bright. Bright bright.”
Lucy Maud knew what he meant. Her daughter shone, some film of the universe still wrapped around her like a caul.
“Isaac, man”—she barely heard Ruben; he was now part of the warp and weft of the night that pressed down upon her—“I don’t know where he came from. So ambitious. Wants so much out of life.” Ruben was quiet for a minute. “But it’s things. He wants a nice house, a certain kind of car.”
“He’s
a good kid.”
Ruben turned this over for a moment, as if he was surprised to hear her say it. “Sure. He is a good kid.”
She laughed, a short, tired sound. “You think Isaac’s too materialistic, but here you are on a treasure hunt.”
He made a sound: half grunt, half laugh. Rueful. “You’re right. But I’m not here because I really want things. Wouldn’t you go after a treasure that was practically in your own backyard?”
She thought about this. “I might wait until it stopped raining.”
A quiet was settling over them, the weight of deep night. She wondered how long it would be until dawn. But then she remembered her phone and checked the time: 3:21. The white light of the screen seemed out of place, jarring in the velvet dark, and when it finally turned off and she slid the phone back into her pocket, her eyes felt tender at the edges.
She rolled on her back, and for a few minutes she was the only thing that didn’t belong in the landscape, a hard brick on the ground, her own contours not matching the contours of the earth. When the dark came back to her vision, when she could see the things around her, she was a small, small thing on the round earth’s surface, granular. Then, somehow, she wasn’t; she was absorbed, a part of something infinite, here on the surface of a dying planet, here with three others of her kind, untethered, a mitered gravity of existence, a swallowing. All four of them slept in the deep night, faces turned up, and the clouds revealed the starlight.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
What Lives in the Caves
In the caves of central Texas, the animals have adapted, growing eyeless in an eternal night. The blind salamander of San Marcos eats blind shrimp in the dark. The salamander’s body is colorless, save for the bloodred gills it has in place of lungs. Bats live here, too, though only for part of the day, so they have kept some measure of sight, though most people don’t know this. The bats of central Texas have become famous, with all those Mexican free-tailed bats pouring out from under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin at summer dusk. Millions of them. In caves, too, small mammals, reptiles, and birds find shelter from the heat at the entrance.
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