Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

by Nancy Wayson Dinan

  “Luce?” he called, the movement of his diaphragm pushing him away from the wall. He held on, but just barely. “I’m going down.”

  The shaft got darker as her head blocked the light. He couldn’t look up, but he hoped she had her hands on the rope around her waist. “Are you going to let go?”

  He didn’t know what else to do. “Yes. Be ready.” He shoved off the wall of the mine shaft so that he wouldn’t scrape his cheek.

  He hung in space for seconds, it seemed, like the coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, then gravity took him. He fell the height of a one-story house, and halfway through his fall, his torso was jerked upward because the slack in the rope had been played out. Light was almost totally blacked out then because Lucy Maud had fallen to her hands and knees above the opening to the shaft, and he recognized in the split second that only by great good fortune for him had she not fallen in after him. He hung in the darkness for that long second, then she pushed herself to her back and the shaft of light appeared again, and then the slack came as she unwound the rope from her waist.

  He went down the rest of the way in jerks and starts, trying to pull himself upright instead of sprawling backward. When at last vertical, he grabbed the rope and his feet entered the water. A few more twists of the yellow rope, Lucy Maud unwinding herself, and he was chest-deep. He still had not touched bottom, and he could see nothing in the chamber; the sunlight reflected off the black water and did nothing but blind him and obscure whatever was underneath.

  “Ruben?” he called, suddenly feeling the edge of panic. Entering the water had changed things for him. He finally understood that Ruben might be dead, and that he could die, too. The water had its own life; he felt pulled by a current, but in multiple directions. Something bumped against his shin and he shivered, thinking of the possibilities. And the smell—oh, God, it was as if he were inside the earth, as if he were already buried.

  There was no answer. Boyd—what would she do? Ruben was likely already dead if he wasn’t answering, right? Kevin should pull on the rope, yell for Lucy Maud to bring him back up. But she would think he was a coward. After a second in the black water, he decided that he might not care.

  He felt something big in the water next to him, and he almost cried. What could live in a cave that was that large? A cave bear? A ghost of one of the dead miners?

  Ruben King rose to the surface, arriving from wherever he had been hiding, and Kevin was livid because he wondered if Ruben had been playing some game. If he’d been here all along, why hadn’t he answered? They could have tossed the rope down to him and Kevin would never have had to climb down here into this wet darkness. But when Kevin saw Ruben’s face, he didn’t blame the man anymore. Ruben looked as if he’d been through hell. He looked at once both red and pale, swollen with the flood, eyes haggard in a way that spoke of trauma. Kevin hugged him out of sheer relief that they could get out of here, and though it was not the right thing to do, Ruben hugged him back. Ruben’s grip around his shoulders reminded Kevin of the first aid training he’d had as a kid, the warning that a drowning person couldn’t help but drown you, too, if you tried to rescue them. If Kevin wasn’t standing firmly on the ground, he would have gone under from the weight of Ruben’s body. Kevin panicked for a second before he righted himself and pulled Ruben’s arms off his neck.

  Ruben seemed surprised that he could stand, and when he put his foot down, he pulled on the rope linking Kevin to the outside world. “Good idea. Wish I had thought to bring a rope.”

  “Where’s the flashlight?” Kevin looked around. “Where were you? Why weren’t you here?” Kevin looked up to the small circle of sunlight.

  Ruben’s gaze followed Kevin’s. “There’s a higher rock toward the back, and I was on it. I was mostly out of the water. For now.” Turning back to Kevin, Ruben reached and rooted around in his fisherman’s shirt. “When I heard you, I made my way over here.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Ruben smiled and produced the flashlight Kevin had reluctantly handed to Lucy Maud in the dark, who had then tossed it down the shaft to Ruben.

  “Does it work? After being underwater?”

  Ruben passed the flashlight to Kevin, who shook it, both to hear the batteries rattle inside and to shed the water beading on the metal case. When he flicked the switch, the light shone weakly, and he pointed it into the dark recesses of the chamber, revealing how close the water was to the top of the cave. He laughed and was surprised by the sound. Nothing about this was funny. “Did you find any gold?” He wanted to know if all of this was worth it.

  From some pocket under the water, Ruben produced a silver ingot, and he held it flat on his palm while Kevin shone the light on it. The ingot was nearly black with tarnish, but Ruben’s fingers had already started to rub some of this blackness off.

  “This isn’t the gold. This isn’t Maximilian. I don’t—” Ruben swallowed and shook his head. “This is a few pieces of silver, for all I can tell, already shaped, and I don’t know if they were even mined here.”

  Kevin nodded and reached a finger to touch the cold metal. “When the rain is over, when the water goes down, I’ll come out here with a colleague from archaeology and we’ll see what we can find.”

  “Colleague from archaeology?”

  “I’m a classics professor.” Kevin felt the usual pleasure at making the statement. “I’m at the university in Austin.” He was careful not to brag, but of course Ruben knew which university. “We’ll come out here, see whether it’s worth exploring.”

  “Allen Potivar won’t like that.”

  “No, but”—Kevin shrugged one shoulder and looked back up at the daylight—“let’s worry about that later. When we’re both dry.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “The plan is to get us both topside somehow. My wife”—Kevin caught himself—“my ex-wife is up there and will help, but she can’t pull us up. The first person will have to climb out pretty much on his own.”

  Ruben nodded, considering. “Okay.” He looked around, and Kevin knew that Ruben wanted to be first. He’d been down here so long already, essentially alone, and Kevin understood that Ruben wasn’t eager to be alone again.

  Kevin sucked in a breath. It didn’t make any sense. The rope was already tied around Kevin’s waist, and Kevin was fresher and stronger, more useful for both climbing up and pulling the other person out. But the look on Ruben King’s face—haunted, almost as if he were holding his breath—made Kevin make his second decision of the day that went against his better judgment. It made no sense for him to untie the rope from his waist, yet he did. He fumbled with the knot under the water and uncinched and unwound himself, fingers slow and reluctant from the water’s drag, then he moved to wrap the rope around Ruben’s waist. Kevin couldn’t help but study Ruben at this close angle, couldn’t help but notice how one of his teeth needed a crown, how his face was jowly underneath the stubble.

  Ruben must have been thinking something similar, because he said, “You think one day we’ll be in-laws?”

  “What?” Kevin stopped winding and pulled on the rope. Lucy Maud poked her head down and gave a thumbs-up, visible twenty feet above them.

  “In-laws? You and me? You think Boyd and Isaac will get married one day?”

  Kevin shrugged. They were so young. His daughter could be so much, if only she chose to be. “Maybe.” He didn’t know. Instead, he said, “Lucy Maud can’t pull you up. You’ll have to do it yourself.

  Ruben nodded, pulling on the line to check it.

  “I can give you a boost,” Kevin said, considering the height of the open chamber. “Once you get to the shaft wall, you can climb it while using the rope.”

  Ruben agreed and climbed up Kevin because Kevin refused to kneel in the dark water, refused to put his head under. He shook underneath the other man’s weight, but once Ruben stood on Kevin’s shoulders, Ruben had only another ten feet or so to traverse. He pushed the balls of his feet into Kevin’s shoulder and jump
ed, hitching his way a good third of the distance to the shaft wall, and Kevin, suddenly lighter, turned to watch him put one hand above the other on the rope, slowly, slowly making his way to the sunshine, to the surface of the earth. Kevin, left behind, was frustrated because it looked as if Ruben could barely hang on, was worried that any second Ruben’s grip would slip and he would fall the length of the rope, crushing Kevin or splashing into the water. In a few minutes, though, Ruben reached the wall and began his tedious climb up that long section.

  Kevin, frigid and bone soaked, wanted out. He was sick of the smell and sound and feel of water. He realized that the water had been halfway up his chest and was now about to cover his shoulders. It seethed around him, burgeoning and animate, and the surface moved in a different direction from the depths. He imagined a whirlpool, barely perceptible, taking him down. But solid rock was underneath him, and he knew with some relief that he could go no farther down. Ruben clung to the rock and inched higher. Soon the sun would be overhead, shining directly down into the mine shaft.

  9:24 A.M.

  The sunlight penetrated the surface of the water, and Isaac lay on his back as if in a dream. The hands reached for him, and he couldn’t tell if the people wanted to help him or harm him, but it didn’t seem to matter, because it seemed as if they couldn’t quite reach him. Now his face was above the water and he stretched out his arms for more buoyancy and the people continued to reach out but not touch him. Then he realized that there was nothing to touch, that his outstretched arms passed right through the bodies of the people gathered around him.

  He struggled to understand, trying to sit up in the swiftly moving current but unwilling to upset the equilibrium his body had found. He realized that he was again gasping for air, that he hadn’t drowned yet, that here he was still in the land of the living but seemed to be surrounded by ghosts. He didn’t believe in ghosts, of course, but here were these people, dressed in these strange clothes, their faces ashen and smudged. When he passed them—when his body passed through theirs—he felt something, some emotion that he knew was not his own, both because he could not discern the emotion’s provenance and because he could never imagine feeling such things. The people were neither good nor bad—they just wanted what they wanted, and that was to claim whatever things they had wanted to claim before they left this earth, and they wanted a human connection again. Some had been killed by violence; some of these people wanted to respond with violence. All of them had wanted more from this life, had left unfinished business, and Isaac felt this longing as his fingers passed through their bodies, as he could not tell if ghosts or water pulled him forward, and it was because Boyd had somehow sent them. For a second, it was as if he could see what Boyd saw—he could feel another person’s feelings.

  And then a ghost boat was on the water, motoring down with a ghost engine. On the boat, the ghosts of a soldier and two women, one middle-aged, one old. The middle-aged ghost took up position at the back near the rudder, and the soldier ghost reached into the water, and this time, Isaac’s arms did not pass through. The soldier gripped him by the biceps and pulled him over the side. Isaac was on his knees, racked with the effort to breathe—how had he not drowned when he had been so fully prepared?—and the middle-aged ghost said, “I don’t believe it. That’s Boyd’s friend. His name is Isaac,” and Isaac knew the voice but couldn’t place it, couldn’t yet make the effort to turn his head.

  9:25 A.M.

  It was impossible to run with a baby, a being with a different center of gravity who had not yet learned to hold her body so it wouldn’t bounce. Boyd pushed Lily’s head to her collarbone with her free hand, now running without using her arms at all. She sensed the river, how near it was, from the way the leaves in the trees acted, as if they were reflecting water. The earth, too, sloped down, the ground soft beneath her feet, and she feared slipping, twisting her ankle, going down with a baby in her arms and a scarecrow girl baying at her heels. And if that scarecrow caught her? The pain of what that scarecrow knew was unbearable.

  Lily was strangely silent amid all of this, and when Boyd glanced down, the baby was too still, and Boyd had an awful premonition, a feeling that she had smothered Lily. But no, the baby blinked up at her, head nestled into Boyd’s collarbone, as if this flight were just another form of rocking.

  Boyd had stretched the distance between them and the scarecrow, her shoes and open gait outmatching it, and though her body was pitched forward with the weight of the baby, she kept her feet as she stumbled down the slope, seeing at last the flat brown surface of the river.

  And, oh, on that surface was a boat, and in that boat sat three people: a soldier, an old woman, and another woman Boyd could now see was her neighbor Carla. Then Carla moved her head and Boyd saw another person behind her—and Boyd almost sat on the bank and cried. The other person was Isaac, kneeling in the bottom of the boat.

  He caught sight of her at almost the same instant and he stood, jostling the vessel, while the soldier at the back spread his arms, rebalancing everything. She recognized the soldier—he was Sam, the man from the bridge, the one she had called to help find Isaac—but she was so relieved that the long night was at an end that she hardly gave him a second thought, even though she had hoped that he would rescue both her and Isaac, and now, here they all were. How far had she wandered?

  She heard footsteps behind her, and she turned to look. The scarecrow was coming down the hill. But Boyd thought, It doesn’t matter. It could not control her here, not with Isaac and Carla and a soldier of the National Guard behind her. Nevertheless, she climbed out on a live oak branch that arced over the water. She would have swum out to meet the boat had it not been for Lily.

  Sam steered the boat toward her, and Boyd went even farther out. The branch grew thinner now, and she balanced herself, cradling the child rather than embracing it, openly weeping in relief. She didn’t care about being wet again, but she didn’t want Lily to get wet. The child—Boyd didn’t know what to think. Only that Lily would have a life where everyone would try to possess her, where everyone would want to be around her, simply because she would be able to meet needs and fill holes. Now even the earth made claims on Boyd—letting her know that it needed something from her, too, that it was in pain and struggling—and she wondered if it would do the same to Lily. The things Boyd had seen and felt lately—the distress, the history layered upon the world—and now she had the sense that there was only so much future, that the things we had done meant that the finite time that the human race would live here was far, far shorter than most people suspected. Boyd knew that Lily would feel these things, too. She was a baby—she couldn’t possibly comprehend the intricacies of human emotion—but one day she would, and then the world would no longer be a place for her to discover and explore but would instead be a place for her to serve nearly against her will, a place of bondage and a constant low thrum of pain. The pain would not start as her own, exactly, but it would become hers, and the wish to stop it would be its own sort of need, one that would never be satisfied. The world’s measure of misery was never in short supply.

  The boat was nearly to the oak where Boyd and Lily perched, but the scarecrow girl scared Boyd. It wanted to own her and she was tired of being owned. More than anything else she wanted freedom, an existence that rode lightly on time and space, that did no harm, certainly, but was also not responsible for the harm done by others.

  She clutched Lily to her and shimmied farther out onto the branch. The water churned beneath her; it was deeper than she’d thought. The boat adjusted course to catch her if she fell, the soldier staring and Isaac reaching out, and still the scarecrow girl came. Boyd realized suddenly that it wasn’t after her but was instead after Lily. It, too, climbed the tree, surprisingly fast and agile. Boyd didn’t know what to do. She pulled her feet underneath her, her knees bent, balancing herself and Lily on the arcing branch. In any second, the boat would be close enough for her to jump in, to hand over the baby. Carla was shouting,
but Boyd couldn’t tell what she was saying. The world wouldn’t claim Boyd today. The only sound was from the outboard motor striking the water. Otherwise, everybody held his or her breath and blinked in the bright sunshine.

  9:26 A.M.

  Kevin was thinking of Boyd, too, as he watched Ruben, now halfway up the wall. The going was extremely slow, and Kevin was getting nervous. More than nervous. He was on the tips of his toes because the water was now so high, and he didn’t want to be on the tips of his toes because the water was now moving so much that any second it would take him.

  Kevin was wondering what Boyd would do—what she would tell him to do—because he was certain that she would know. She’d cultivated this sort of knowledge in the same way he’d studied languages. She would tell him to get close to the chamber wall, maybe, so that he could hold on as the water rose. Or she would tell him to stay right there in the middle, so that he wouldn’t get lost. He was afraid to shout for help, even, afraid that he would startle Ruben off the sheer wall and that they would have to start over. So he let the water rise to his chin and then past it. Now he tilted his head back to breathe, closing his eyes against that one bright patch of sunlight. Still Ruben climbed.

  When it was too late, Kevin tried to shout, but when he opened his mouth, it filled with water. The mouthful of water weighted him down; his head fell back and his feet came up. He reached out both arms, flailed a bit, tried to regain his footing. He did—for a brief moment, he was on his toes again, though now several feet from where he’d started. His footing wasn’t stable, however; the next second, he was once again on his back, once again swallowing the flood, and the current took him deeper into the cave, no matter how much he tried to swim against it. Soon he was in the dark, headed down, and his head no longer cleared the surface. He thought of a beach near Nafplio where he’d once gone with his grad student, and he wanted so badly to tell Emily some things about her career, wanted to help her puzzle out the two endings of Iphigenia, wanted her to mention him in the acknowledgments of the book she was writing. He thought, too, of a morning when he was in undergrad and Lucy Maud was eating oranges at the kitchen table, thought about an afternoon in South Dakota when he’d slipped a band of tricolored gold shaped into roses on Lucy Maud’s ring finger. He would give anything right now to tell her that he knew how she had sacrificed, how she had made him Dr. Montgomery, how he had never been able to repay her. He thought of Boyd, knew the way she had been afraid to bother him, afraid to distract him from his work, which had always been more important. How horrible to come to the end and to know that your daughter believed this, and that you had never taken the time to correct this notion. Too, he remembered the way the tips of her cheekbones had grown red as the summers progressed, the way freckles had settled over her shins and the backs of her hands. Sunshine was in so many of these memories, a burnished and underappreciated happiness.