The Cave Dwellers

by Christina McDowell

  “Killed going down to that jail?” Bunny laughs. “Call the psychiatric hospital for yourself. I’m leaving.” She runs down the hall and out the front door, slamming it behind her.

  Mount Zion Cemetery

  Clement Morgan was the first Black man to graduate from both Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is buried “somewhere in the Mount Zion Graveyard” in Georgetown. “Somewhere,” because the graves are cracked and crumbling in clustered piles; faded inscriptions and muddy land make reading any names nearly impossible. The cemetery, owned by Mount Zion Church, which was the first Black congregation of Georgetown, marks the burial ground of hundreds of the formerly enslaved and freemen. Unlike Oak Hill Cemetery, the “white graveyard” next door, there are no wrought iron gates protecting it from intruders, no immaculate cenotaphs and tombs, no gardeners watering its boxwoods every Saturday. Ravaged by neglect, it sits behind a run-down apartment building and beside an alley full of trash cans, dumpsters, and rats.

  The eroding land remains a stark reminder of the racial and economic injustices as well as the gentrification that Georgetown has endured for over a century.I The graveyard may also have served as a hiding spot on the Underground Railroad. Those in the process of fleeing the terror of slavery were believed to have hidden in an eight-by-eight-foot windowless brick structure on the side of the hill that was used to store frozen corpses during winter.II

  I. “Death of a Cemetery: Mt. Zion’s Disrepair,” The Georgetowner, March 26, 2015, https://georgetowner.com/articles/2015/03/26/death-cemetery-mt-zions-disrepair/.

  II. “Mount Zion Cemetery’s Underground Railroad Shelter,” Atlas Obscura, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mount-zion-cemeterys-underground-railroad-shelter.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Bunny sits on a bench in a deserted graveyard. She looks out at the opposite hill beyond the deep valley of Rock Creek Park, where she can see the lights of Billy’s towering mansion through the cold and leafless woods. In the shadows, as the cloudy winter night hovers over crumbling graves, Bunny hears the sound of crunching snow. She turns her head to the right and sees two sinewy figures approaching her. Spooked, she pops up from the bench and ducks behind a tipping cenotaph; pulling down on her pink beanie, she squints to see who it is as one of the figures trips and slams into a headstone.

  “Dude, are you okay?”

  The sound of laughter.

  “Fucking buzzzz killll,” the other one says.

  Bunny moves closer, shines her cell phone light straight into their eyes. “Marty?”

  Marty, wearing a red beanie, puts his right hand up, squinting, holding a joint with his left. He jumps back.

  “It’s Bunny. It’s Bunny!” she says. She moves her flashlight over. “Chase? What are you guys doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” Marty asks.

  Chase swings a glass bottle of Russian vodka by his side. “Bunny Foo Foo hoppin’ through the forest!” he laughs to himself.

  “Don’t fucking call me that,” Bunny says, eerie echoes of Audrey teasing her in middle school. She looks at Marty. “I asked you first.”

  “We got kicked out of school,” Chase blurts out, then takes another swig of vodka, sweat forming along his greasy hairline.

  “What?”

  “We didn’t get kicked out of school,” Marty corrects him, pushing his glasses up his nose as he moves closer to Bunny. “Harvard rescinded my acceptance letter.”

  “Oh, shit, no,” Bunny says.

  “Yep, me toooo.” Chase chucks the bottle of vodka into a bush. He stumbles over toward Marty and wraps him in a drunken bear hug. “But we have each other.”

  “Shut up, Chase, you got into Rollins, not Harvard,” Bunny quips.

  “Harvard, Schmarvard!” Chase sings out, staggering. “It’s all the fuckin’ same if you’re a rich man in AMERRRIIICCAAAA!!!!” He pounds his chest.

  “Go home, dude,” Marty says, “it’s your bedtime.”

  “Nah, man,” Chase says, “my dad is gonna hook me up to his lie detector again.”

  “So don’t lie,” Marty says.

  “You’re no fun, lame-ass.” Chase pulls his cell phone from his parka pocket and calls an Uber. “I miss Stan-the-man!” He wobbles off toward the brick path, then shouts, “Texting Billy you two are alone in the graveyard!”

  “Fuck you!” Marty yells back.

  They watch Chase stagger off. Bunny greets Marty on the other side of a headstone. “Can I?”

  Marty passes Bunny the joint.

  “I’m sorry this is happening,” she says, then inhales and passes the joint back.

  “Well, it happened. The vodka and Purple Kush are numbing the pain though,” Marty says, examining the joint.

  Bunny puts her hands in her pockets; there’s an ice storm coming. “Do you think it really matters where we go to school? Where we end up?”

  Marty breathes in the cold air, looks up to the sky. “Did you know that the probability of any one of us going to St. Peter’s Academy is less than getting struck by lightning?” He inhales the last of the joint, then kneels and rubs the roach into the dirty snow.

  “Are you serious?” Bunny laughs.

  “I did the research,” Marty says. Standing up, he puts his hands in his pockets.

  “I would have rather gotten struck by lightning,” Bunny says.

  Marty leans against the back of the bench, the marijuana pushing him into a deeper analysis of self. “It matters to me,” he says, dropping into a more serious tone, “even though, if you look at it, at the probability—we’ve technically already won the lottery of life.”

  Bunny looks at Marty, and she feels a pang of guilt. “It’s my fault,” she says, “I should have never filmed you guys.”

  “Ah, don’t worry about it, Bunny, we all took part.”

  “But I wasn’t on camera, and it wasn’t my phone.”

  Marty sniffles and straightens his back to sober up a bit. “Well, the truth is, my dad’s position at Howard is probably enough to get me in there. And give or take a year, I’ll just transfer somewhere else if I want. At the end of the day, I dunno, it matters and it doesn’t—where we go to school. But I let my grandparents down, that’s what’s eating me.” Marty shakes his head.

  Bunny looks at him in wonder and in silence. She feels the opposite. She feels a kind of hereditary, genealogical disdain for her grandparents. And the shame feels invisible; she doesn’t know how to respond.

  “So I won’t work for the CIA or the State Department, big deal. Sucks more for Billy, man,” he says.

  “What? No it doesn’t. Why do you say that? Billy doesn’t even want to go to the academy.”

  “Yeah, but his father’s a public figure. Billy got trolled the hardest today, and it’s only gonna get worse,” Marty says.

  “I haven’t talked to him since earlier so I don’t really know what’s going on.”

  “He’s been acting distant since even before the overdose—just super irritated a lot. What’s going on with you guys anyway?”

  “Nothing… it’s… we broke up, I guess, but we’re talking… more like fighting, still. It’s the pressure from his dad, I know it. And then I did something that upset him, and it just brought up a lot of shit about our families and… expectations about who we’re supposed to be, you know? But I think he might be starting to come around, given that his dad is probably going to prison.”

  “Yeah, General Montgomery’s always been kind of a dick—but, fuck, you think he’ll actually go to prison?”

  “If the president doesn’t pardon him.”

  Marty shakes his head. “First Audrey, now this, what’s next?”

  Bunny takes a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket. Puts an unlit cigarette to her lips.

  “Bunny and her cigarettes, so old school,” Marty teases.

  She stops herself. So old school. Bunny looks at the cigarette and snaps it in half, then takes the whole pack out of her pocket and stomps on it.
>
  “Whoa, what’d I say?”

  “Nothing. I’m done, all right? I’m done smoking cigarettes,” Bunny says.

  “Okaaay.” Marty looks at her with skepticism. An awkward moment passes. “What are you doing here anyway? Why are you all alone in an abandoned graveyard? It’s a little creepy, Bunny. Are you okay?”

  “Got into a fight with my mom… thinkin’ about Audrey, wanted to hang among the ghosts of America’s past, I guess.”

  “So you came to Mount Zion? This is my side of the tracks,” Marty teases, “your people are buried over there.” He nods toward the other side of a chain-link fence where Oak Hill Cemetery is—equipped with twenty-four-hour security cameras and where Bunny’s ancestors are buried, still segregated from Mount Zion—a dark, visceral reminder of the priorities of preservation in American history.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to be on my side anymore,” Bunny says. She looks over at Marty. She wants to tell him about Anthony; she wants to talk to him about what it’s like being the only kid of color in her class; she wants to know what he thinks about the murders, about Anthony, whether or not he thinks he did it; she wants to know what he thought of Audrey’s flaunted wealth; she wants to know whether he believes white people have an unconscious fear that if America were to obtain true equality, would the Black man do to the white man what the white man had done to the Black man? But in this moment, she is afraid to ask. She knows Marty is wealthy; his family lives in a cozy town house down the street crammed with overflowing bookshelves and the law degrees of his professor parents. Worried she might offend him, or say the wrong thing, Bunny finds herself resisting—it feels far too intimate—easier perhaps with Anthony, the two of them in different buildings, separated by a fake ID and a television monitor, where by circumstance she has more power, not just because of her family but because she is physically free. And she wonders if even thinking about all of these things makes her a terrible person.

  “Do you miss Audrey?” Marty asks.

  “Sometimes,” Bunny says honestly, “but she could be a real bitch.”

  Marty laughs. “All right, you’re being honest. We weren’t that close… but it’s still sad.”

  Bunny looks up, white flakes clustering in her strawberry eyelashes. “Do you think he’s still out there?”

  “Who?”

  “The person who murdered her family.”

  “They arrested that guy though,” Marty says.

  “Yeah, but do you really think he did it?”

  Marty exhales, exhausted, stoned, drunk. “I dunno, Bunny.… But, you know, my parents are skeptical. They told me not to tell anyone, though, out of respect for the family and all that. People just want to feel like justice has been served even if only on the surface. They got a face for the crime? Makes ’em feel safer even if it isn’t true—but that’s what my parents say, anyway.”

  Bunny looks at the snow collecting on the toes of her boots. “Yeah, that makes sense.” She looks out into the woods toward Billy’s house twinkling in the distance, too afraid to ask more.

  Another awkward moment passes between them.

  “Come on, let’s get outta here,” Marty says, “or we’re going to get buried in the snow.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Cate walks along the East Colonnade of the White House gazing out at the decorative Christmas trees, which have been spray-painted a menacing red, as if she’s entering the gates of hell. The annual Christmas party is filled with members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, business leaders including Jeff Bezos, and country music stars just out of rehab. There are flying midgets (they prefer the term midget because the president said so) swinging from trapeze lines in the East Room delivering bags of sugar cookies embossed with the gold presidential seal to guests. The midgets were flown in from Las Vegas’s MGM Grand Hotel.

  Cate wanders along the red felt carpet in a black-and-white Rent the Runway gown and her late great-aunt’s pearls, feeling antsy about Doug, when her work cell rings.

  “Senator Wallace’s office.”

  “Hi, Cate?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Anne from the Washington Post. We spoke—”

  “Yes, I remember,” Cate says, turning her body away from clusters of cabinet members’ wives and families, little boys in suspenders and girls with silk ribbons in their hair.

  “Right, well, I’m just calling to let you know that our piece will be going live in a few days, and I wanted to give you one more opportunity to come forward with any sensitive information you might have about the senator’s history of any sexual misconduct.”

  “Glad you got your corroborating evidence,” Cate says, a smirk across her face as she gazes out the window at Doug on the White House’s South Lawn walking an alpaca with bells around its neck. Haley and Mackenzie stroll next to him in their coordinating holiday dresses.

  “I did,” Anne replies. “It’s not pretty, Cate.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Cate says. “He’s clean, what can I tell you?”

  Doug hands Mackenzie the alpaca leash, then pulls on his crotch. Cate squints her eyes.

  “You have until ten o’clock tonight to call me back,” Anne says.

  “Merry Christmas, Anne.” Cate hangs up, then calls Doug as she spies on him and his daughters behind one of the red Christmas trees. She sees him look at his phone and then press Ignore as she hears it go to his voice mail. Before Cate can call him back, she sees Betsy approach him on the lawn wearing one of her signature red capes. Holding a flute glass of champagne, she goes in to cheers him, puckering her lips as Doug leans in for a kiss. Cate drops her phone. A woman who seems about seven feet tall, in a sequined dress with feathers poking out of it à la vaudeville, reaches down and hands Cate her cell phone.

  “Thank you,” Cate says.

  “Sure thing, honey.”

  * * *

  The sound of a helicopter startles guests before they realize that Marine One, the president’s helicopter, is descending from the sky preparing for a surprise landing.

  “Haley, Mackenzie, look!” Doug shouts. The alpaca leaps from the deafening chopping sound, the rope yanked from Mackenzie’s hand as the furry animal hops across the lawn in sheer panic. Two other alpacas run wild as well, having escaped the grips of bratty children.

  “Come back!” Mackenzie screams above Marine One’s engine, clutching her wig as she runs after it. Her heels catch in the wet grass.

  Betsy sips her champagne, still as a posturing peacock. She points to a secret service agent and mouths, Could you handle that? Thanks, shooing him off to chase the alpaca.

  “Haley, come on!” Doug motions for her to catch up to him as he jogs toward the helicopter like a kid at LEGOLAND, other scattered guests fleeing for a good view.

  Haley slumps over in boredom, moans, “Dad, I already saw this. It landed on our soccer field last week, remember? I told youuuu.”

  “Is that true?” Doug asks.

  “We watched it land during PE.” Haley rolls her eyes, cradling a special kind of apathy for an eleven-year-old.

  * * *

  From inside the Blue Room, Cate texts the senator: I saw you ignore my call, meet me in the Blue Room. She’s standing in front of President Bill Clinton’s portrait. The Marine Corps band plays swing-style Christmas music.

  Doug enters, flustered, stressed. “Jesus, Cate, my family is here.”

  “That didn’t stop you at a funeral. You assume I called you in here to fuck like Marilyn Monroe, but seeing as we’re not fucking anymore, I thought I’d just relay the news that the allegations will be going live in the coming days.”

  “Okay, whoa, easy, easy,” Doug whispers, looking around the room. “First, I thought we settled this—”

  “Well, the reporter called me again, very, very sure this time that I had information about your office—your history of sexual misconduct. She was giving me a second chance to give her something.”

  Doug feels Cate’s to
ne shifting from team player to threatening. His shame is so deep inside of him his cheeks don’t even flush anymore. “Everything that’s happened between the two of us has been consensual. I don’t understand… what are you doing?”

  A man dressed as a golden nutcracker walks by and offers them champagne. Doug waves him away.

  “Oh, I know, Doug. But rumor is that you’ve been, and I quote, ‘sticking your dick around town,’ and not just in me—”

  “Okay, Jesus, keep your voice down,” he says, practically begging.

  “You are my boss, and a friend of my uncle’s, and, well, this isn’t gonna look so good.”

  “I’m listening, I’m listening,” he says. His eyes dart left, then right.

  “I think everyone around here has always been a fan of the quid pro quo. So, for my silence, I’d like communications director when you run for president, maximum payout plus benefits.”

  Doug runs his hand over his bald head, like the generals and the Corcorans! “I’ll have outside counsel send an ironclad. Okay? I have two daughters, Cate.”

  “Oh, I know you do… and one of ’em is still fucking her Black boyfriend.” Cate smiles. “Merry Christmas, Doug.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Anthony appears on-screen, his eyelid swollen shut; he has a gash on his right arm, stitches crisscrossing along what looks like a knife wound, a knot tied at the end holding his flesh together. Bunny picks up the blue telephone and presses it to her ear.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Hey.” Anthony tugs on the edge of his stitches, an itch. Bunny winces and directs her eyes down, avoiding the wound. “Did you give them the money?” he asks, visibly anxious.

  “I went to see your sister and… I’m sorry, she didn’t want the money, Anthony,” Bunny says, but with a cruel withholding—Bunny doesn’t even have the money.

  Anthony glares at her with contempt, a pervasive silence so strong she can feel it vibrating through the monitor.