by Pete Hautman
I check my mirror and pull back onto the highway.
“I’m Stiggy,” I say.
“Cool,” he says. “You going to Hannibal too?”
“I’m just driving,” I say.
“Cool.” We ride along without talking for a few minutes. I swerve around a dead opossum. Back in Iowa most of the roadkill was raccoons, but now in Missouri all I see is squashed possums with their naked tails.
“I come down from Rhinelander,” Knob says.
“Where’s that?”
“Wisconsin.”
We pass another billboard advertising Mark Twain’s childhood home.
“Mark Twain,” Knob says. “I read a book he wrote.”
“Which one?” I ask.
“The one about the dog. Something about the wild.”
“The Call of the Wild? That’s Jack London.”
Bob frowns. “Pretty sure it was Mark Twain.”
I decide not to argue.
A minute later he says. “Maybe it was Jack London.”
“Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn.”
“Oh. Yeah. You got that right. My bad.”
“What’s in Hannibal?” I ask.
“Mark Twain.” He laughs and slaps his thigh, raising a puff of dust. A second later he says, “I got a job waiting on me. At least I think I do. Farmwork. You ever do farmwork?”
“Nope.”
“It ain’t the easiest way to make a living, I’ll tell you that.”
“I suppose somebody’s got to do it.”
“You got that right.” He takes a hand-rolled cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “Mind if I fire one up?”
“Crack the window,” I say.
He opens his window a couple of inches, then struggles with a disposable lighter, clicking it about ten times before he gets a flame. He inhales, holds it, and lets it out. It’s not tobacco.
He offers me a hit.
“No, thanks,” I say. Weed just makes me sad.
“Suit yourself.” He takes another drag. I crack my window too. He takes a couple more hits, then spits onto his palm, douses the joint, and slips it back into his shirt pocket.
“How’d you get that name, Stiggy?” he asks.
“It’s from my initials, SG.”
“Cool.”
I don’t ask him why he’s called Knob, but he tells me anyway.
“I got stuck with ‘Knob’ twenty years ago on account of military school. First year, they called all us noobs ‘Knob.’ Like we were a thing. Didn’t last, though.” He laughs. “Five weeks. They kicked me out. But the name stuck on me.”
“I quit school,” I say.
“How come?”
“Too many assholes.”
“I feel ya, man. Being human’s a bitch. Some days I wish I was a dog.”
Again we lapse into silence. Knob’s chin drops to his chest. I think he might be asleep. A couple of minutes later he rouses himself and looks at me. I hadn’t noticed before, but his eyes are two different colors—one blue, one green.
“Listen,” he says. “Seriously. Do you know who you are?”
“I know who I am.” Saying it out loud makes me wonder if it’s true.
“You sure? Suppose you take off that cap. You still you without John Deere on your noggin?”
“Sure.”
“Because you think it’s obvious? Suppose you get a haircut. Still you?”
Sounds like a trick question, so I just shrug.
“Suppose you chop off your little finger. Still you?”
“What’s your point?”
“Suppose I could take out your brain and hook you up to some tubes and wires so you could still think. You ever see that movie?”
“I think I saw that on Doctor Who. Or maybe it was Star Trek.”
“Yeah. Would you still be you?”
“I hope I never find out.”
“What about if you get killed. You think you have, like, a soul or something?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Well, it don’t matter, but it proves you don’t really know who you are. But I do.”
“Okay,” I said. “Who am I?”
“You’re a point, man. A location. A nexus.”
“Great. I always wanted to be a nexus.”
“We all are, man.” He takes the joint out of his pocket, digs out his lighter, flicks it a few times, curses, flicks it some more. No luck. He tosses the lighter out the window. “Got a light, dude?”
“Sorry.”
“These new cars suck, man.”
“Ten years old isn’t exactly new,” I point out.
“It’s all relative, man. Use to be, every car had a lighter. Now they don’t even have ashtrays. Screw it.” He tucks the dead joint back into his pocket. “Later, man,” he says. I’m not sure if he’s talking to me, himself, or the joint. We ride in silence for a few minutes.
“So, what’s a nexus?” I ask.
“A connection, man. That’s it. It’s what we are. Like, most people think they’re a soul stuck inside a sack of skin full of muscle and blood. They think all the stuff around them—their clothes, this car, the air, the trees, the people—they think that’s something else, but the thing is, who we are is the sum of all the things we’re connected to. Like, your knee bone connected to your thigh bone, your thigh bone connected to your hip bone. You know that song?”
“I think I heard it once.”
“It’s called ‘Dem Bones.’ My gramps used to sing it. Anyways, who you are is a nexus, a clot of electrical impulses inside a meat puppet wrapped in cotton and leather and polyester inside this piece-a-crap lighterless vehicle on this strip of asphalt. You’re just a particular point that happens to be in the middle of it. It gets bigger—or infinite, depending how you look at it. You are your family, you’re your friends, you’re me, and I’m you. You’re everybody you know and everybody you’ve ever met, and if you want to get, like, cosmic, you’re also the people you haven’t met yet, the places you’re gonna go, the things you’re gonna do. That’s who you are. You know John Donne?”
“Nope.”
“Well, he’s been dead a few hundred years, so I ain’t surprised. He wrote this poem, ‘No Man Is an Island.’ You know it?”
“It sounds familiar.”
“You should look it up. Dude knew some shit.”
The Caves
“Are we lost?” Gaia asked.
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know if we’re lost, then we’re lost.”
We were in my dad’s Mustang. It was a risk, taking it without permission. Mom had left me on my own while she attended a two-day yoga retreat up in Bayfield, where they sit in these really hot rooms and sweat out all their problems. I wanted to show Gaia my future ride, so I took the Mustang. As long as I didn’t wreck it, Mom would never know.
It was a sunny and hot Fourth of July. We had the air-conditioning cranked. Even if we never found the caves, I told myself, it was a nice day for a drive in the country. We were up on the bluffs, looking for a nameless dirt road that led down a coulee to the cave entrance. Grant had told me there was no sign, but he’d said, You can’t miss it.
“Grant said to turn onto Pike Road, then right on the first road after the goat farm. Did you see a goat farm?”
“How does a goat farm look any different from any other farm?”
“They have goats, I guess.”
“Is that a goat?”
I slowed down. “I think that’s a sheep.” A few seconds later I spotted a small sign ahead: GRISWOLD’S GOATS.
“Ha!” I said. “Told you.”
Off to the left was a large grassy field, and yes, there were goats grazing. A few hundred yards later we came to a dirt road leading off to the right. I hit the brakes, too late to make the turn. Gaia lurched forward but was saved by her shoulder belt. “This must be it.” I put the car in reverse and backed up.
Gaia was leaning forward, reaching for something on the floor.
“Did you lose this?” she asked. “It must have been under the seat.”
I stopped the car. “Let me see.” It was an iPod. My dad’s, I supposed, although I hadn’t known he had one. “It must be ancient—it doesn’t even have a camera.” I tried to turn it on, but the screen stayed black. “Battery must be dead.” I stuck it into the glove compartment and turned onto the unmarked road.
“Are you sure this is a road? It looks more like somebody’s driveway.”
“We’ll find out.” The road angled down, twisting and turning. It was so narrow, I worried about cars coming from the other direction, but none did. We went over a wooden bridge and continued to descend. “It’s too long to be a driveway,” I said.
The road narrowed even more; plants were dragging against the sides of the car. After about half a mile the trees thinned and we could see the river. The road jogged hard right. We kept going, the bluffs rising on one side, a swampy morass on the other. Soon we arrived at a sort of gravel pit cut into the side of the bluff. There was one other car there—a Chevy Tahoe. I pulled in next to it.
“I guess we won’t be the only ones in there,” Gaia said.
At the far side of the sand pit was an opening about ten feet high in the sandstone bluff. The opening was blocked by a set of rusty steel bars.
I turned off the car.
“How do we get in?” Gaia asked.
“Grant said there’s an opening.” I grabbed my backpack from the backseat and got out. As we approached the opening, I could see that the bars were part of a locked gate set into a steel frame solidly embedded in the sandstone. The gate had been welded shut. Gaia pointed out a well-worn path leading off to the right.
The path zigzagged up through a tumble of boulders and into some stunted trees growing sideways out of the bluff. The path hooked back around and ended up on a ledge about four feet above the steel gate. An opening had been hacked into the soft limestone behind the top of the steel frame. Probably Grant or one of his buddies swinging a pickax. There was just enough room to squeeze down between the bars and the rock and climb down the inside of the gate.
“I guess this is how we get in,” I said. “You sure you want to?”
“You brought a flashlight, right?”
“Two flashlights.”
“What if we get lost?”
“I brought water and granola bars too.” I examined the opening, then took off my backpack and handed it to Gaia. “I’ll go first, and you hand this down to me.”
“Okay.”
I slid over the edge of the ledge, grasped the top of the steel frame, and eased my legs into the opening. As I lowered myself behind the gate, it occurred to me that getting out again would not be easy. We’d have to climb up the gate and pull ourselves up through the opening. I was pretty sure we could do it—I mean, everybody else who had been in the caves had gotten out. At least I hoped so.
A few seconds later I was standing at the bottom, looking out through the bars.
“Okay,” I said. I saw Gaia’s face above me, then my backpack.
“Can you catch it?” she called down.
“I think so.”
She dropped the backpack; I caught it and set it aside.
“Here I come,” she said, and I was looking at the bottoms of her sneakers.
I reached up and grabbed her ankles. “I got you.”
“Don’t let go,” she said.
She lowered herself slowly, climbing hand over hand down the gate until we were standing side by side, our backs to the gate, looking into the darkness.
“Now what?” she said.
Chiropterans
We shined our flashlights into an arched passageway about fifteen feet high. The floor was sandy and flat, with thousands of footprints and lots of garbage: beer cans; food wrappers; discarded clothing; a rusted, twisted bicycle frame with no wheels.
“Why would anyone bring a bike in here?” I wondered aloud.
“People are weird,” Gaia said.
We couldn’t see the end of the tunnel—it went straight into the bluff for as far as our flashlights could penetrate. We walked forward, neither of us speaking, following a snaking path through the scattered trash. The caves smelled like wet sand with a slight sour tang. After about two minutes of walking, we came to a wall with passages heading off to the left and the right. I could see from the footprints and trail of trash that most people turned left. The passage to the right sloped up slightly.
“Maybe we should leave a trail of bread crumbs,” Gaia said.
“Oops. Forgot the bread.”
“We’ll just have to keep track, then. How big do you think this place is?”
“Grant said he got lost for, like, an hour once. But he was drunk.”
“If we make only right turns, then to get back, all we have to do is make only left turns.”
I had a feeling that didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t find the flaw in her logic.
“You want to turn right, then?”
“Might as well.”
We set off up the less-used, right-hand passage. There wasn’t as much trash on the floor, but I noticed as we moved deeper into the passageway that the sand underfoot was getting darker, and the sour smell became stronger, and I heard a faint rustling sound.
“What’s that noise?” Gaia asked.
We stopped, and I shined my light around the tunnel. There was something odd about the ceiling.
“Oh my God,” Gaia whispered. “Are those bats?”
Those were bats, thousands of them, covering the ceiling above us.
It took us about ten seconds to run all the way back to the intersection. We stopped there, gasping for breath.
Gaia was gagging and coughing.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Okay?” She made a retching sound. “I feel like my lungs are coated with bat poop.”
I reached back and pulled a water bottle from my backpack. “Here.”
She drank, and then I drank.
“Can you get rabies from bat poop?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.” I hoped not. “Do you want to leave?”
“Just give me a second.”
We drank more water.
“Grant said there might be some bats.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.” She was bent forward, hands on her knees. I thought she might be about to throw up.
“You want to go?” I asked.
She stood up straight and shook her head. “As long as we’re here, we should look around.”
“So . . . left turn?”
“Left turn.”
• • •
The tunnel with all the footprints and garbage had no bats. I kept shining my light up to check. We had gone about a hundred yards when I saw a faint light up ahead. The tunnel curved, then opened up into a circular chamber about half the size of a gymnasium. The back wall was stepped—four big curved tiers, each about three feet high, like a giant stairway to nowhere. There were dozens of candles on the lowest level. Only a few of them were lit. I shined my flashlight around. There were three other openings leading to more passageways. We were alone.
“I wonder who lit the candles,” Gaia said.
I shined my light into each of the other openings.
“This looks like a place where they sacrifice virgins,” I said.
Gaia gave me a sharp look.
“I didn’t mean anything by that,” I said.
Her look got sharper. “What makes you think I think you meant something?”
“I don’t . . . I mean—”
Just then something came flying out of one of the passageways. For a fraction of a second I thought, Bat!
The thing hit the ground. It’s too big to be a bat, I thought—and then the world exploded.
Intensely bright flashes shot into my eyes, and my eardrums were pummeled by a storm of loud, sharp cracks. I heard a scream. Maybe it was me.
It took me only a second to realize that so
meone had thrown a large string of firecrackers—not just a string, but a big coil. The chamber was filling with smoke. I clapped my hands over my ears and looked around for Gaia, but I couldn’t see her.
“Gaia!” I shouted. I could barely hear my own voice. The fireworks showed no sign of slowing down—it must have been one of those thousand-firecracker spools. I was looking around frantically, but the flashes from the explosions had left me half-blinded. She must have fled into one of the passages. I picked the closest one and ran into it—and into somebody.
Somebody big. I bounced off and landed on my butt. My flashlight went flying, and broke when it hit the wall. I’d gone about thirty feet into the tunnel, and it was dark. All I could see were afterimages. My ears were ringing, but they weren’t ringing so bad that I couldn’t hear the laughter. It sounded like at least three guys.
“Oh man, that was epic!” somebody said.
A bright light hit me in the eyes. I put my hand up to block it and tried to see who was holding the flashlight.
“You okay, Twiggy?” I knew that voice. Grant McMann.
I jumped to my feet and ran at him. I didn’t care what happened to me, I just wanted to smash my fists into his face.
“Whoa!” he said, grabbing my wrists in an iron grip. “Down, boy!”
“You asshole!” I screamed and struggled in his grip, and tried to kick him in the nuts, but he saw it coming and blocked my foot with his massive thigh. It was like kicking a rock.
“Easy, Twig. It was just a joke.”
“Joke? Where’s Gaia? Did she come this way?”
“She took off, dude,” one of the other guys said. There were four of them: Grant; his best friend, Adrian Youngblood; Ben Gingrass, the enormous nose tackle for the football team; and Vern Sommers, who’d gotten kicked off the team for drinking.
“Where?” I shouted.
“Back the way you came in. You should’ve seen her face when those things started going off!”
I turned and headed back toward the chamber.
“Twig! Wait up!”
I ignored him. The firecrackers were still going off, lighting up the end of the tunnel. When I got there, the chamber was so full of smoke, I could hardly see across it. I started coughing. I shielded my eyes and ran past the exploding string and into the other passageway, still coughing. I’d gotten only a few steps in when I realized that I had no light.