The Ruins

by Scott Smith

  "I cut my leg," he shouted, then waited, listening, but he couldn't tell if there was a response.

  It doesn't matter, he thought. I'll be all right. It was the sort of empty reassurance only a child would find comforting, and Eric knew this, yet he kept repeating it to himself nonetheless. It was so dark, and there was that cold air pouring across him from the shaft, that watchful presence, and his right shoe was slowly filling with blood, and Pablo's screaming wouldn't stop. I'm at the end of my rope, Eric thought. And then, again: It doesn't matter. I'll be all right. Just words, his head was full of words.

  He was still holding the lamp in his left hand; somehow, he'd managed to keep it from breaking. He set it on the ground beside him, reached out, found the Greek's wrist, grasped it. Then he crouched there in the darkness, saying, "Shh, now, shh. I'm here, I'm right here" as he waited for Pablo to stop screaming.

  They could hear Eric shouting, but they couldn't make out his words over Pablo's screaming. Jeff knew that the Greek would stop eventually, though-that he'd tire and fall silent-and then they'd be able to find out what had happened down there, whether Eric had jumped or fallen, and if he, too, was hurt now. For the time being, it didn't really matter. What mattered was the rope. Until they figured out how to lengthen it, there was nothing they could do for either of them.

  Jeff thought of the clothes first, of emptying the backpacks the archaeologists had left behind and knotting things together-pants and shirts and jackets-into a makeshift rope. It wasn't a good idea, he knew, but for the first few minutes it was all he could come up with. He needed twenty feet, probably more to be safe, maybe even thirty, and that would be a lot of clothes, wouldn't it? He doubted if they'd be strong enough to support a person's weight, or if the knots would even hold.

  Thirty feet.

  Jeff and Mathias stood beside the windlass, both of them straining to think, neither of them speaking, because there was nothing to say yet, no solution to share. Amy and Stacy were on their knees beside the hole, peering into it. Every now and then, Stacy would call Eric's name, and sometimes he'd shout something back, but it was impossible to understand him: Pablo was still screaming.

  "One of the tents," Jeff said finally. "We can take it down, cut the nylon into strips."

  Mathias turned, examined the blue tent, considering the idea. "Will it be strong enough?" he asked.

  "We can braid the strips-three strips for each section-then knot the sections together." Jeff felt a flush of pleasure, saying this, a sense of success amid so much failure. They were trapped here on this hill, with little water or food, two of them out of reach down a mine shaft, at least one of them injured, but for a moment, none of it seemed to matter. They had a plan, and the plan made sense, and this gave Jeff a brief burst of energy and optimism, setting them all into motion. Mathias and he started emptying the blue tent, dragging the sleeping bags out into the little clearing, then the backpacks, the notebooks and radio, the camera and first-aid kit, the Frisbee and the empty canteen, tossing everything into a pile. Then they began to take down the tent, yanking up its stakes, dismantling its thin aluminum poles. Mathias did the cutting. There was a brief debate about the desired width and they settled on four inches, the knife slicing easily through the nylon, Mathias working with strong, quick gestures, cutting ten-foot strips for Jeff to braid. Jeff was halfway through the first section, taking his time with it, keeping a tight weave, when Pablo finally stopped screaming.

  "Eric?" Stacy called.

  Eric's voice came echoing back up to them. "I'm here," he shouted.

  "Did you fall?"

  "I jumped."

  "Are you okay?"

  "I cut my knee."

  "Bad?"

  "My shoe's full of blood."

  Jeff laid down the nylon strips, stepped to the mouth of the shaft. "Put pressure on it," he yelled into the hole.

  "What?"

  "Take off your shirt. Wad it up, press it against the cut. Hard."

  "It's too cold."

  "Cold?" Jeff asked. He thought he'd misheard. His entire body was slick with sweat.

  "There's another shaft," Eric called. "Off to the side. There's cold air coming from it."

  "Wait," Jeff shouted. He went over to the pile from the blue tent, dug through it, found the first-aid kit, opened it. There wasn't much of use inside. Jeff couldn't say what he'd been hoping to find, but whatever it might've been, it certainly wasn't here. There was a box of Band-Aids, which were probably too small for Eric's wound. There was a tube of Neosporin that they could put on when they hauled him back up. There were bottles of aspirin and Pepto-Bismol, and some salt tablets, a thermometer, and a tiny pair of scissors.

  Jeff carried the bottle of aspirin back to the shaft, stripped off his shirt. "What happened to the lamp?" he shouted.

  "It went out."

  "I'm going to drop my shirt down. I'm knotting a bottle of aspirin inside it. And the box of matches, too. All right?"

  "Okay."

  "Use the shirt to put pressure on your cut. Give three of the aspirin to Pablo and take three yourself."

  "Okay," Eric said again.

  Jeff knotted the aspirin and the matches into the shirt, then leaned out over the hole. "Ready?" he called.

  "Ready."

  He dropped the shirt, watched it vanish into the darkness. It took a long time to land. Then there was a soft, echoing thump.

  "Got it," Eric called.

  Mathias was done cutting strips, and he'd taken up the braiding Jeff had abandoned. Jeff turned to Amy and Stacy, who were both still peering into the shaft. "Help him," he said, nodding toward Mathias, and they walked over to the dismantled tent, crouched beside the German. Mathias showed them how to braid, and they started on their own sections.

  Down in the shaft, a faint glow appeared, gaining strength: Eric had managed to light the lamp. Jeff could see him now, crouched over Pablo, the two of them looking very tiny.

  "Is he okay?" Jeff called.

  There was a pause before Eric answered, and Jeff could see him examining the Greek, holding out the oil lamp, bent low over his body. Then he lifted his head, shouted up toward him. "I think he broke his back."

  Jeff turned from the shaft, glanced at the others. They'd stopped working and were staring back at him. Stacy had her hand over her mouth; she seemed as if she were about to start crying again. Amy got to her feet and came toward him. They both peered down into the hole.

  "He's moving his arms," Eric called to them, "but not his legs."

  Jeff and Amy looked at each other. "Check his feet," Amy whispered.

  "I think he might've, you know…" Eric paused, seemed to search for the right words. Finally: "It smells like he shit himself."

  "His feet," Amy whispered again, nudging Jeff. For some reason, she wouldn't shout it herself.

  "Eric?" Jeff yelled.

  "What?"

  "Take off one of his shoes."

  "His shoes?"

  "Take it off-his sock, too. Then scrape the bottom of his foot with your thumbnail. Do it hard. See if there's a reaction."

  Amy and Jeff leaned over the shaft, watching Eric crouch beside Pablo's feet, pull off his tennis shoe, his sock. Stacy came over to watch, too. Mathias had resumed his braiding.

  Eric lifted his head toward them. "Nothing," he called.

  "Oh God," Amy whispered. "Oh Jesus."

  "We need to make a backboard," Jeff said to her. "How can we make a backboard?"

  Amy shook her head. "No, Jeff. No way. We can't move him."

  "We have to-we can't just leave him down there."

  "We'll only make it worse. We'll jostle him and he'll-"

  "We'll use the tent poles," Jeff said. "We'll strap him to them, and then-"

  "Jeff."

  He stopped, stared at her. He was thinking about the tent poles, trying to imagine them as a backboard. He didn't know if it would work, but he couldn't think of anything else for them to use. Then he remembered the backpacks, their metal fram
es.

  "We have to get him to a hospital," Amy said.

  Jeff didn't respond to this, just kept watching her, taking the backpacks apart in his mind, using the tent poles for added support. How did she imagine them getting him to a hospital?

  "This is bad," Amy said. "This is so, so bad." She'd started to cry but was struggling not to, wiping the tears away with the heel of her hand, shaking her head. "If we move him…" she began, but didn't finish.

  "We can't leave him down there, Amy," he said. "You know that, don't you? It's not possible."

  She considered this for a long moment, then nodded.

  Jeff leaned over the hole, shouted, "Eric?"

  "What?"

  "We have to make a backboard before we can bring him up."

  "Okay."

  "We'll do it as fast as we can, but it might take a little while. Just keep talking to him."

  "There's not much oil left in the lamp. Only a little."

  "Then blow it out."

  "Blow it out?" Eric sounded frightened by this idea.

  "We'll need it later. When we come down. We'll need it to get him on the backboard."

  Eric didn't respond.

  "All right?" Jeff called.

  Perhaps Eric nodded; it was hard to tell. They watched him bend over the lamp, and then-abruptly-they couldn't see him anymore. Once again, the bottom of the shaft was hidden in darkness.

  Stacy and Amy resumed the braiding of the nylon strips while Jeff and Mathias struggled to make a backboard. The boys were muttering together, arguing over the possibilities. They had the tent poles, a backpack frame, and a roll of duct tape Mathias had found among the archaeologists' supplies, and they kept putting things together, then taking them apart again. Stacy and Amy worked in silence. There ought to have been something soothing in the task-so simple, so mindless, their hands moving right to left to right to left-but the longer Stacy kept at it, the worse she began to feel. Her stomach was sour from the tequila she'd chugged; she was cotton-mouthed, her skin prickly from the heat, her head aching. She wanted to ask for some water but was afraid that Jeff would say no. And she was growing hungry, too, light-headed with it. She wished she could have a snack, drink something cool, find a shady place to lie down, and the fact that none of this was possible gave her a tight, breathless feeling of near panic. She tried to remember what she and Eric had in their pack: a small bottle of water, a bag of pretzels, a can of mixed nuts, a pair of too-ripe bananas. They'd have to share, of course; everyone would. They'd put all their food together and then ration it out as slowly as they could.

  Left to right to left to right to left to right…

  "Shit," she heard Jeff say quite distinctly from across the clearing; then they began to tear apart their latest attempt at a backboard, the aluminum poles clinking dully as they knocked one against another. Stacy couldn't even look at the two of them. Pablo had broken his back, and she just couldn't face it. They needed help. They needed a team of paramedics to come in a helicopter and fly him to a hospital. Instead, they were going to pull him up on their own, bumping and jostling him all the way to the surface. And when they got him out-then what? He'd lie in the orange tent, she supposed, moaning or screaming, and there wasn't a thing they'd be able to do for him.

  Aspirin. Pablo's back was broken, and Jeff had dropped him a bottle of aspirin.

  Jeff took a break, walked across the clearing, stared down the hill. Everyone stopped to watch him. They're gone, Stacy thought with a brief jump of hope, but then Jeff turned and came back toward them, not saying a thing. He crouched again beside Mathias. She heard the clinking poles, a ripping sound as they tore off another piece of tape. The Mayans were still there, of course; Stacy knew this. She could picture them ringing the base of the hill, staring up the slope with those frighteningly blank expressions. They'd killed Mathias's brother. Shot him with their arrows. And now Mathias was kneeling there, holding the aluminum poles for Jeff to tape, absorbed in the difficulty of it, the solving of the problem. She couldn't begin to understand how he was managing this, couldn't understand how any of them were managing what they were doing. Eric was down at the bottom of the shaft, in the darkness, his shoe full of blood, and she was braiding strips of nylon, one hand moving over the other, tightening the weave as she went.

  Left to right to left to right to left to right…

  The sun was beginning its implacable slippage toward the west. How long had this been happening? Stacy didn't know what time it was; she'd left her watch back in her hotel room, forgotten it on the table beside the bed. Realizing this, she felt a momentary tug of anxiety, thinking that the maid might steal it, a graduation present from her parents. She was always expecting hotel maids to steal her things, and yet in all the traveling she'd done it hadn't happened, not once. Perhaps it wasn't as easy to get away with as it seemed, or maybe people were simply more honest than she assumed. In her head, she could hear the watch ticking, could picture it lying on the glass tabletop, patiently counting off the seconds, the minutes, the hours, waiting for her return. The maids turned down their beds for them in the early evening, placed tiny chocolates on their pillows, leaving the radio playing so softly that sometimes Stacy didn't notice it until after they'd turned out the lights.

  "What time is it?" she asked.

  Amy paused in her work, checked her watch. "Five-thirty-five," she said.

  When they finished with the braiding, they'd need to haul up the rope and knot the sections of nylon onto its end. Then someone would have to descend into the hole with the improvised backboard and help Eric lift Pablo onto it, somehow securing him to the metal frame so that they could pull him safely back to the surface. After that, they'd drop the rope down yet again and ferry the other two, one after the other, to the top.

  Stacy tried to imagine how long all this might take, and she knew it was too long, that they were running out of time. Because if it was 5:35 now, creeping toward 5:40, then they had only another hour and a half before dark.

  In the end, they had to braid a total of five strips. They knotted the first three onto the rope, then dropped it back down the shaft to see if it was long enough, but Eric shouted up to them, saying it was still out of reach. So they braided a fourth section, only to realize when it came time to attach their improvised backboard that they'd need two separate strips hanging from the bottom of the rope, one to connect to the head of the aluminum frame, the other to its foot.

  While Mathias was quickly braiding this final addition, Jeff took Amy aside. "Are you okay with this?" he asked.

  They were standing together on the square of dirt where the blue tent had formerly sat. The sun was almost at the horizon, but it was still bright out, still hot. That was how it was here, Amy knew: there was no transition between day and night, no gentle easing into evening. The sun rose almost immediately into a noontime intensity, which it didn't relinquish until the moment it touched the sky's western edge. And then you could count the day into darkness-that was how fast night came on. The only lamp they had was the one with Eric, and it was low on oil. Fifteen minutes, she guessed, and they'd be working blind.

  "Okay with what?" she asked.

  "You'll be the one to go down," Jeff said.

  "Down?"

  "Into the shaft."

  Amy just stared at him; she was too startled to speak. He'd taken one of the archaeologists' shirts to replace the T-shirt he'd thrown down to Eric, and it looked odd on him, making him seem almost like another person. The shirt had a sheen to it-it was meant to pass for khaki, but it didn't; it was some sort of polyester, with buttons down the front and large pockets on each side of the chest. It looked like something a hunter might wear on safari, Amy thought. Or a photographer, maybe, with rolls of film jammed into those peculiar pockets. Or a soldier, perhaps. Somehow it made Jeff seem older-larger, even. His nose was pink and peeling, and though he looked tired and sun-worn, there was a jittery quality to him, an aura of heightened alertness.

  "Mathias and
I have to turn the crank," he said. "So it's either you or Stacy. And Stacy, you know…" He trailed off, shrugged. "It just seems like you should be the one."

  Still Amy was silent. She didn't want to go, of course, was terrified of the idea, of dropping into the earth, into the darkness. She hadn't even wanted to come here-that was what she wanted to say to Jeff. If it had been up to her, they never would've left the beach in the first place. And then, when they'd discovered the hidden path, she'd tried to warn him, hadn't she? She'd tried to tell him that they shouldn't take it, and he'd refused to listen. This was all his fault, then, wasn't it? So shouldn't he be the one to descend into that hole? But even as she was asking herself these questions, Amy was remembering what had happened at the base of the hill, how she'd retreated across the clearing, peering through her camera's viewfinder, her foot slipping into the tangle of vines. If she hadn't done that, maybe the Mayans wouldn't have forced them up the hill. They wouldn't be here now-Pablo wouldn't be lying at the bottom of the shaft with a broken back; Eric's shoe wouldn't be full of blood. They'd be walking somewhere miles from this place, every step carrying them farther away, all six of them imagining that the mosquitoes and the tiny black flies and the blisters forming on their feet were things perfectly worthy of complaint.

  "You were a lifeguard, weren't you?" Jeff asked. "You ought to know how to handle this sort of thing."

  A lifeguard. It was true, too, in a way. Amy had spent a summer working at a pool in an apartment complex in her hometown. A tiny oval pool, with a seven-foot deep end, no diving allowed. She'd sat in a lawn chair, sunning herself from ten until six, five days a week, warning children not to run, not to splash or dunk one another, and telling the adults that they weren't supposed to bring alcohol into the pool area. Both groups largely ignored her. It was a small complex, teetering on the edge of solvency, full of her town's downwardly mobile-drinkers and divorcées-a depressing place. There weren't that many children, and on some days no one came to the pool at all. Amy would sit in her chair, reading. If it was especially quiet, she'd often slip into the shallow end and float there on her back, her mind going empty. She'd had to take a lifesaving class, of course, before she was hired. And there must've been a lesson about spinal injuries, how to secure someone on a backboard. But, if so, she retained no memory of it.