by Jeff Vrolyks
“This must be the brake,” he said.
“Probably,” she agreed.
He leaned against the cart and it budged, squeaked.
Carmen took her backpack off and unzipped it. “I came prepared. You’re going to think I’m a genius when you see what I brought. He shined his flashlight inside her backpack and smiled at the yellow disposable camera.
“You brought a camera! Cool! I was thinking how cool it would be to get a picture inside this thing.”
“Oh I know, so was I. But that’s not why I’m a genius.” She lifted up a can of WD-40, brandished it with a smile. “For the wheels.”
“Wow, you are thoughtful. That’s a great idea.”
She knelt down and sprayed copious amounts of the lubricant on the axles at all four wheels. They pushed the cart until the wheels rotated half a turn and sprayed more WD on them. She put the can back in her backpack and got on the other side of the cart, prepared to push the cart toward the entrance. “Let’s push it outside where there is more light. We’ll snap a couple pictures.”
There was a gleam in her eye that Theo adored. She was excited and so was he. He moved beside her and they pushed. At first it barely rolled, but it began trundling up the track toward the mouth. The slope was mildly uphill, but together they were able to manage it. Once they got it outside, Theo tugged the brake, even though it wasn’t going anywhere on its own.
“Get inside and I’ll take a picture,” she said. She ran inside the mine and returned with her backpack, snatched the camera from inside it and discarded the bag for now. Theo looked inside for spiders or bats first, and it was free from either. There was a little dirt on the bottom, a few clumps of dirt, and Theo wondered if there might be silver in them. He hopped inside and took one such clump of dirt and squeezed it. It popped and crumbled into dust. No silver. He positioned himself for the camera, one hand on the rail, the other on the brake, and smiled at Carmen who stood ten feet away and aimed the camera at him. “Say cheese.”
“Cheeeeeeeese.”
Snap.
She lowered the camera. “My turn.”
“Okay.” He clambered over the rail and hopped down to the packed dirt.
She handed him the camera and got in. She folded her arms on the trailing ledge, perched her chin on them and gave a silly smile. He snapped a picture. She then stood erect, put her arms over her head like she was on a roller coaster ride, and made an wide-eyed open-mouthed expression. He snapped another picture.
“You’re going to have to give me a copy of these when you get them developed.”
“Okay. Hey, I want a picture of us both inside.”
“That would be awesome. But how?”
“The camera has a timer, I think it’s fifteen or twenty seconds. We can set it on that branch.”
She got out of the cart and marched over to the branch in mind, a low hanging thick one, and contemplated how she’d keep it there without it falling off. Theodore had an idea. He took her backpack and where two branches near the end diverged from the main branch, he placed the backpack. The slight weight of its contents lowered the branch an inch, but it remained.
“Aren’t you smart,” she said candidly. She placed the camera on the backpack and looked through the viewer, adjusted it until the cart was centering it. “Awesome. This is going to be perfect. Go get inside.”
He scurried to the cart and hopped inside. He had flutters in his stomach at the though of Carmen being so close to him inside, and how they’d surely be touching one another.
“Ready?”
“Yep.”
“Okay.” She frowned at the camera, checked the viewer one last time, and pressed the timer button and ducked under the branch and ran to the cart. Once her leg was up on the rail, Theo grabbed her by the waist and helped her in. She thanked him and positioned herself up front. She pulled him up beside her so their shoulders were touching. She put an arm around him and he put one around her. They both smiled, and the flash went off.
“Woohoo! We got it!” she exclaimed and faced him in the cart. On a whim she put her arms around him and hugged. He put his head on her shoulder and breathed the scent of her shampooed hair. She released him and said, “Let’s do like Indiana Jones and ride this sucker inside the mine.”
“Do you think it will roll?” he said doubtfully.
“We were able to push it here, weren’t we? And it was uphill. Let’s try it. We have the brake in case we get going too fast.”
Theo doubted going too fast was going to be the case. He imagined he’d be pushing her along the mine, that was probably the only way she’d be getting a ride. And he was fine with that. She’d be excited and he loved how she looked when she was excited.
“Alright, let’s do it. You stay inside. I’ll push it until it gets going, then I’ll jump inside with you. If it doesn’t move fast enough, I’ll just keep pushing you.”
“You’re so sweet, Teddy Graham. I’ll do you next time. It’s only fair.”
“Whatever. Are you ready?” He jumped out and leaned into the cart.
“You don’t think it will be like Indiana Jones and there will be parts with gaps for us to fall to our deaths, do you?”
Theo chuckled. “That’s just the movies. Ready?”
“Do it.” She shone her flashlight down the maw of the mine.
“Here goes nothing!” He pushed with all his might and it began moving forward. It was slow going until they reached the part of the track which descended more steeply, and then it was going almost on its own. Carmen was squealing, saying Faster! Faster!
Theo pushed even harder, running behind the cart between the rails, careful not to step on one lest he twist his ankle. They had gone maybe ten yards, twenty, and the cart was steadily moving faster.
“Come up with me, Beaver! Here, I’ll help you in!”
“Okay.” He leaned even harder and pushed the cart a few more strides. He couldn’t believe this was working so well.
He lunged up and slung a leg over the rail, sat astride the narrow one-inch ledge. True to her word Carmen put her arms around him and pulled him in. They tumbled inside and fell clumsily to the bottom of the cart. She was laughing so incredibly hard that it affected laughter out of him. He shifted a little; his arms were around her, just as hers were around him. There was the steady rhythmic sound of click-click… click-click, and it seemed the intervals between clicks was lessening, which meant they were moving faster.
She touched her forehead against his, shone the flashlight up from under their chins. He saw a great big smile, and her big blue eyes which were an inch from his. He wasn’t sure if it was he who initiated it or her, perhaps they both moved in at the same time, but they kissed. A short kiss on the lips, the kind a mother would give her child. But it was enough to send Theo into orbit. His heart flooded with emotion and he thought he might cry he was so happy.
Click-click…click-click…
“Beaver,” she said almost in a whisper. “Did we really just kiss?”
He nodded.
“Did you like it?”
He nodded bigger.
“Me too.” As if to prove it, she moved in and kissed him again. A little longer this time, but still brief. She pulled away and said nothing.
Click-click…click-click…
“I… I don’t know what to say,” Theo said. “I’m so happy.”
She smiled at that and scrambled to get back up. “Let’s enjoy our ride.”
“I already am,” he said inwardly.
It was tough for them to get back upright with the momentum of the cart and their bodies entwined. Carmen stood first, Theo was still on his back, love-drunk and in no hurry to get up. But get up he did.
“Oh crap!” She said. What little light there was went away. It was now pitch black.
“What?”
Click-click…click-click…
“I dropped my flashlight. Shoot. We’ll get it on the way back, no big deal. Let me see yours.”
&nbs
p; “Maybe we should stop this thing, we’ve probably gone a long ways.”
“I wonder how far it goes.”
“I don’t know.”
He removed the flashlight from his jeans pocket, turned the head and extended it to Carmen. He didn’t notice it outright, because there was indeed light coming from his borrowed Coleman flashlight now, but in the depths of his awareness there was conflict. Something didn’t jibe. Light had preceded the light of his flashlight. A dull glow in their confined environment, instantly washed away by the concentrated beam of white light from Coleman. Because it was of little or no significance, the thought or realization never fully developed, and what was left was his growing affection for Carmen.
Click-click… thud-click…
The cart shimmied on its track for a moment, Carmen shrieked.
Theo reached back to the brake and pulled it. A scraping sound was shrill and loud, and didn’t appear to be slowing them down. “It’s not slowing us down!” he cried.
“Pull harder!”
He was pulling it with both hands already. The shrill scraping continued, and by degrees they began slowing down. It might have been all inside Theo’s head, but he thought they were on level ground now, and that was the reason why they were slowing.
The cart finally came to a stop. What was incredibly loud seconds ago was deafening silence. And blackness, save for the lone beam of light penetrating through it. She shone it in every direction. The mine was all of ten feet wide and maybe seven feet high. The air was stale and earthy.
Theo was the first out of the cart. He held his arms out and she went into them; he pulled her out. “That was so much fun!” she cried.
“I loved it,” he said, remembering the pair of kisses.
“I don’t think we’ll ever get the cart back to the top.” She giggled. “What do you think?”
“Probably not. I wonder how far we went?”
“I don’t know. Far. Very far. We were hauling butt.”
“That’s for sure. WD-40 is some great stuff.”
“No doubt. It felt like we were going downhill pretty steeply for awhile.”
“Yeah we were. It’s kind of creepy in here.”
“Maybe there are wild animals in here. Bears and lions.”
“Yes, lions for sure.”
They giggled and began their long walk back. It was level enough for a bit, then an incline. Not steep, but enough to have given the cart the speed it had achieved.
“It is so quiet in here,” she said. “I bet there are a lot of spiders in here.” She shivered. “I have the goose bumps.” She reached her left hand to his right hand and held on to it.
He looked down at their intertwined fingers in awe. He could scarcely see them, but boy how he felt it. The beam of light was raking over the mine before them.
“It doesn’t bother you that I hold your hand, does it?” She said. “It’s comforting.”
“Not at all. I agree, comforting.”
“I should probably not tell my parents about this. They might get mad.”
“They’ll see the pictures, won’t they?”
“That’s alright, I just don’t want them to know we rode the cart like Harrison Ford.”
“I thought we were going to crash there for a minute, didn’t you?”
“Yes!” She said. “What was that?”
“A rock probably. Almost derailed us. We’d have been hurt real bad.”
“Didn’t seem like a rock. Didn’t make much of a sound. Maybe we hit a bear or a lion.”
“Yes, probably a lion.”
They laughed again and continued onward and upward.
“Beaver…? I don’t want you to go back to California,” she said decidedly.
“I don’t want to go back. I want to stay here. With you.”
She looked over at him, shone the light on his face. He squinted. “You mean that?”
“Of course.”
“Was it the kiss?”
“Kisses.”
She giggled. “That was my first kiss.”
“Mine too.”
“I’m glad we did it. Supposedly you never forget your first kiss, so I’ll always remember you, no matter what happens between us. And that it happened in the cart going a million miles an hour only made it better.”
“Yes. I’ll never forget it. Never forget you.”
“You’re such a teddy bear, Teddy Graham.”
“Thank you.”
Theo was swinging their joined hands lightly, staring down at them, relishing her soft skin in his. Then she came to an abrupt stop, which stopped him.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“What’s that?”
Her voice sounded different. It sounded wrong. It alarmed Theo. He followed the beam of her flashlight up the mine. Thirty feet away, maybe less, was a dark mass beside the track, like a heap of black blankets. And there were other objects strewn about. Dark inscrutable objects.
“I… I don’t know,” he breathed. “That’s what we hit, I think.”
“Is it an animal?”
“Maybe.”
They continued forward with great apprehension, hands clasped together tightly. The beam of light never left the mass. Twenty feet away. Seventeen.
Carmen gasped so severely that it scared Theo, nearly buckled his knees. “Oh my God… Oh my God…” she breathed.
Maybe she had better vision than did he, because he didn’t see what the matter was. “What’s wrong, Carmen?”
She collapsed to her knees on the dirt floor. Theo was able to lessen the impact of her fall by lifting up on her arm as she fell.
“What’s the matter!” He said desperately. “Are you okay?”
Now on her back, hand still in his, she said, “That’s a man. I think… I think we killed a man.”
Theo’s heart beat like a war drum. “It can’t be,” he whispered. She nodded once, laid down on her side, buried her face in her hands and began weeping. He took the flashlight still alight beside her and shone it up the mine at the mass. He did see something, something less dark than was the majority of it. He stepped forward a few steps, and then there was no denying it. What he was looking at was the neck and back of a man in dark clothing and dark hair. And he was still.
Theo rushed to the man, shone the light on his face. The man was at least his father’s age, perhaps forty. He wore a thick black beard, had a big bulbous nose, red. His eyes were half open and lifeless. There was a trickle of blood from an ear. High on his left cheek and extending up to his temple was dirt. But it wasn’t dirt, it was a bruise. There was an old pot tipped over on its side just a few feet up from him, a little butane hot-plate beside it. There was a blanket between the tracks. It was too easy for Theodore to imagine what had happened. This man, probably homeless, was living in here, probably cooking some soup or something, and was seated between the tracks or on one of them. The cart came ripping down the mine and blind-sided him, hundreds of pounds of fast-moving iron slamming into him unyieldingly, killing him probably at once.
“Oh my God,” Theodore breathed. He directed the light back down the mine to Carmen. He could hear her muffled sobs.
“He’s dead, isn’t he,” she said between sobs.
He didn’t answer. He returned to her side, knelt beside her and said, “We need to get out of here. Come on, get up.” He took one of the hands covering her face and pulled her upright without her resisting him. “It’s not our fault, we didn’t know. Let’s get out of here.”
She nodded once and together they headed toward the mouth of the mine, still so damned far away. They slanted away from the man, walking as far from his as the narrow mine permitted. When Carmen began running, Theo didn’t wonder why. He felt like running, too. They sprinted up the marginal slope, not saying a word.
They exited the cave into blinding yellow light. They shielded their eyes until they adjusted to it, panted and heaved deep breaths. Carmen snatched the camera and backpack balancing between t
wo thin branches, put the former inside the latter, slung it over her shoulder and without a word put forth in the direction of home. Her cheeks were tear-scarred, eyes bleary. Theo fell in step beside her. They walked for several minutes before the silence was broken.
“What should we do?” He asked her.
“I don’t want to go to jail, do you?”
“Of course not. They wouldn’t put two eleven year olds in jail. Would they?”
“I don’t know. Probably. For murder? Probably.”
“We didn’t murder anybody, it was an accident. Maybe he was already dead.”
The idea was new to her, and she stopped, eyes widened with hope. “Do you think so?”
He didn’t. But should he lie to her? That probably wasn’t a good idea. They needed to be on the same page to figure this out. “No, there was blood in his ear, it was fresh.”
She moaned a rueful sound and continued forward. “This can’t be happening. I want to wake up now.”
“Carmen, we need to decide what to do. The way I see it we only have two choices: tell your folks or pretend it never happened.”
“I’m a terrible liar. My parents always know when I’m lying.”
“We won’t need to lie. Nobody will ask us anything about it because nobody knows except us. I vote we pretend it never happened.”
“I don’t think I can live with myself knowing I killed someone.” A sob.
“We don’t have a choice. What’s done is done. Carmen,” he took her hand and stopped her. They faced each other. “This is what happened: we went for a hike, never got anywhere near a mine. Then we came home. That’s all that happened. Okay?”
She nodded.
“We need to make a pact, never to mention this. Someday someone will probably go inside that mine and find a dead man. When news gets around, we will act surprised, okay?”
Another nod.
“Promise me. Because our stories need to match if anyone finds out.”
“I promise.”
Theo wasn’t sure her vow was sincere. Imperiously he dug into the front left pocket of her jeans and pulled out the pocket-knife. She watched expressionless. He folded out a blade, no more than an inch in length, and cut a slant across his left palm. He gestured for her hand and she gave it up. He cut her hand the same way, she hissed. Bright red blood seeped from it. He brought their hands together, clasped his fingers between hers and held their joined hands up between them.