Gunther's Cavern

by Edward Etzkorn

  CHAPTER 3

  With a rock shaped like a spatula, Gunther dug around the hole’s edges. The mud and stones fell away at once, plummeting to some unknown depths. Within ten minutes, he’d dug an opening wide enough to wriggle through. When he stuck his head in the opening, he could see nothing. A stale smell assailed his nostrils. The cold air gave him a sense of airiness, a sense that whatever space his head occupied, it did not end a mere meter or two away.

  June’s voice oozed anxiety. “Gunther …”

  “It’s definitely a cave,” he called back, his head still underground. “But I can’t see a thing.”

  “Oh, Gunther …”

  He did not need to look at her to know she was wringing her hands.

  “Hallo-o-o-!” he called into the void.

  The greeting repeated itself over and over, as if his message were being repeated a dozen times along a telegraph line that led from upstate New York to the prairie states of the Midwest and across the Rockies to the west coast.

  June’s voice emerged from above as firm as Mom’s when she stood with her arms folded. Like Mom’s, June’s hips would be tilted to one side—firm, yet ready to yield. “Gunth, we’ve got to tell Dad and Mom first.”

  Gunther popped his head back into the air. His head felt as if it could float away. “We will. But not just yet.” He thought fast. “We need our caving gear.”

  She wrung her hands. “Gunth, you know we don’t have everything we need.”

  Leaping to his feet, he grabbed her by the shoulders. “June, we’ve got everything we need today. Today’s just a quick look-see. Tomorrow might be different. If that’s the case, we can get Jimmy B to drive us to Zeke’s store and pick up whatever we’re missing.”

  She huffed and frowned as Mom would have done, pawed the earth with her feet like a nervous pony. “Gunth, it’s too dangerous. You know that. We can’t …”

  He wanted to scream. He wanted to jump up and down. He wanted to lap up the dirt with his tongue, and dive into this new world that lay just inches below his feet. All at once, he had become the child and June the force of reason.

  Containing his urge with a maximum effort, he grabbed her shoulders tighter. He felt each word trip off his tongue. “June! It’s o-kay! We’ll just pop inside and take a look around. We’ll have our caving gear on. If the cave goes deeper than a few feet, we’ll come right back out and tell Dad and Mom. Or Jimmy B. There’s no harm in just looking, is there?”

  “Oh, Gunth. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  He could not mistake the excitement in her voice. His inner devil smiled. She had yielded. She wanted this as much as he did.

  CHAPTER 4

  Gunther already owned a substantial collection of caving gear, most of it purchased on eBay at far below its usual cost, with a few items purchased from Zeke’s caving shop in Catskill. With only a minuscule income from performing odd jobs, Gunther had learned to be shrewd with his purchases. His parents had never voiced objections. Amateur cavers themselves, they figured he would never, ever just happen to find a cavern, and any established cave he wished to visit required transportation from one of them. Over the past few months, he’d had to redirect his mom’s thoughts on several occasions when she’d voiced concern that once he got his driver’s license this summer he could drive to places of his own choosing when she and his dad were at work.

  Whenever possible, he’d purchased his items in twos—one for him and one for June. He did not need to consult his inventory list to know what items he was lacking. He’d kept June up to date on his purchases, and now hoped she would not remember which things he still needed. Like Mom, she would refuse to enter an unknown area if even one item was missing. He could simply not wait another day to dive into his new-found hole.

  To his relief, June left him alone back at the house while she hunted down her own personal items from her closet and from under her bed. Alone in his room, he pulled his backpack down from the middle shelf of his bookcase and dumped it out on his bed. Beside the contents of his backpack he dumped the contents of the canvas bag of equipment that he kept on the floor. Within two minutes he’d segregated the future items from the immediate essentials. Jacket, boots, knife, and headlamp—plus a few extra batteries—went into the pack, while rope, carabiners, ascenders, and canteen went into the canvas bag. The extra rope, the miniature flashlights, and the long-expired food items—nutrition bars, unopened peanut butter and jelly jars, and a bag of sloppy joe mix—he returned to the shelf. No need to carry extra weight. Today was just a look-see.

  He grabbed his helmet from the corner and fingered the crack on the top of it—not bad enough to keep him from going underground. Perhaps a piece of duct tape to hide the crack from June …

  A little spit, a rub with a Kleenex, and a couple of pieces of duct tape, applied so that it looked like an “I,” made the helmet look almost new. Gunther turned it over in his hands, pleased with his handiwork. Now let’s hope she’ll forget about the sewing kit, her knife, and the fresh batteries that he kept promising to buy and always forgot.

  June met him in the hallway, her pack slung over her back. “Ready, Gunth.”

  “Me, too.”

  “How bad’s your helmet?”

  Gunther blinked with feigned innocence. “My helmet?”

  “Yes, you know—it’s cracked. Remember?”

  Darn these women. He offered her his helmet. “Looks okay to me.”

  Stopping just shy of the staircase, she took it from him and held it up in the light from the window in Mom and Dad’s room. “Gunth, you know this won’t do. If you bash your head …”

  “I won’t bash my head. And anyway—today’s just a look-see. Remember? We’re not going far inside.”

  She sighed as she handed it back to him. The gleam of excitement in her eyes told him he was reprieved—for now. “I guess it’ll pass for a look-see.”

  She flew down the stairs, stopping so fast at the bottom he nearly ran into her.

  “You know I don’t have a decent knife, and we don’t have a sewing kit, and the batteries are expired …”

  “Just a look-see,” he reminded her. “If it’s worth coming back for tomorrow, we’ll drive to Zeke’s first. Probably don’t even need to go that far. The Turtle Ridge General Store should have …”

  “Okay, okay!” This time, she got as far as the broken concrete pad outside the door before stopping. She waited for Gunther to close the door.

  “We’ve got to call Jimmy.”

  Gunther dropped his canvas bag and threw his arms up in the air, hoping to emphasize how petty he thought her concerns. “Why?”

  “You know we promised Mom we’d tell someone if we went anywhere.”

  “We’re only going to the backyard.”

  She set her arms squarely on her hips. “Would you rather I call Mom?”

  Alarms squawked through his brain. With an exaggerated sigh, he went through an elaborate procedure of digging his phone out from his caving pack. “Girls,” he muttered, in a voice just loud enough for her to hear.

  Jimmy B lived with his sister, a psychologist who worked for the school district, in a house up the road from June and Gunther. The house had been abandoned and in danger of collapsing before Jimmy bought it. He’d fixed it well enough to be sure it would not collapse—not, at least, unless the wind exceeded 50 or 60 miles per hour. Well known in the neighborhood for his country-boy good looks and his easygoing manner, ten years older than Gunther, Jimmy was Gunther’s best friend. He also filled the role of uncle, or the older brother Gunther never had. And he’d become the one person Gunther and June, Mom and Dad could trust always to tell the truth.

  Jimmy’s voice came on the phone after eleven rings—fast, Gunther thought. His voice sounded breathless, as if Gunther had caught him at the gym. More likely inhaling potato chips too fast.

  “Yeah.”

  “Jimmy!”

  The breathlessness in Jimmy’s
voice vanished at the sound of Gunther’s voice. “Gunth! What’s up!”

  “Nothing much. Still summer, you know. June and I are taking a stroll in the hinterlands. Just wanted to let you know—we promised Mom and Dad we’d always let someone know where we were.”

  “Well, thanks, Gunth. If I wasn’t so busy today I might join you. Got a real conundrum here.”

  Gunther sighed, pulled the phone away from his ear long enough to point at it and give June a crinkled-up look that made her shake with laughter.

  “… don’t know what to do,” Jimmy was saying when Gunther returned the phone to his ear. “That leaky faucet at Brandows—holy Toledo—losing a gallon a day, what with the Sahara getting drier every year. And Lawrences say they gotta finish roofing that old barn before the next thunderstorm.” He panted once or twice. “And then there’s Luisa Steinmetz and her sacred flies.”

  “The baby flies that come out of the window frame and buzz on her window?”

  “The very same.”

  “How urgent are those things?”

  “Pretty urgent. I promised all those folks I’d get to their problems today.”

  “So which one are you working on now?”

  Jimmy cleared his throat. “Well, that’s the thing. I can’t figure which one to start.”

  “Mets on TV today?”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “There’s your answer. Later, bro!”

  Gunther hung up fast, before Jimmy could recover.

  He and June laughed as he checked to make sure the door had closed tight.

  “Hit the road, Sis!” he exclaimed.

  “Beat you there! Last one there helps Jimmy with the flies!”

  Gunther’s hurry to reach the cave entrance made the hill seem higher than it had on their first trip this morning, and the downhill longer. Arms aching, Gunther dropped his equipment in the weeds alongside the stream. June did the same. Like magnets craving metal, his eyes sought out the entrance to his cave, half-expecting the hole to have disappeared over the past hour like his dreams of the Cyclone appearing in the field behind his house. Yes, the hole was still there. It was real. It was still breathing. And it could be entered.

  Plopping down at its edge, he examined it again. Grabbing a flat rock nearby, he dug away at its edges, removing another few inches in each direction. Rocks beneath the soil forbade him from digging it any wider.

  He stood back from the hole and inspected it. “That should give us enough room.”

  June said nothing as she looked to the hole, then back at him. She was breathing as hard as if she’d run the trail to the summit of Hunter Mountain without stopping for rest. Her eyes were nearly popping out of her skull.

  “Ready?” he said.

  “Ready.”

  Without another instant’s hesitation, he went into action. As if he’d prepared for this moment all his life, he removed his coil of rope, six carabiners, and three runners—loops of nylon webbing made for fashioning slings or securing rope to rocks, trees, and other stationary objects—from the canvas bag. “It’ll probably be boring, just a nothing-special cave that goes in a few meters, then peters out. We probably won’t even need the rope.” But he was so excited he could not complete even two sentences without stopping to take a breath.

  “Even if it’s boring, I want to see it. We agreed—remember?”

  Of course he remembered. Half a lifetime ago—over seven or eight years—they had made a pact that if he ever found a cavern, they would enter together. “Of course. If I go, you go. If you go, I go.” He spat on his thumb and held it out.

  She did the same, and they rubbed their thumbs together until the spit dried.

  “Ugh,” he said.

  “Ugh,” she returned.

  Without another word, he fixed one of the twelve-inch runners around a lip protruding from his rock. He uncoiled the rope, passed one end through the runner and pulled it through to about the middle of the rope. With an excited glance at June, he fed one end into the hole. He tried to mask his disappointment when the end of the rope stopped about three meters down, suggesting that the cave stopped there. A flash of June’s eyes told him she’d picked up on his disappointment—as she always did—but she said nothing and he continued as if he hadn’t seen.

  As if they’d rehearsed the next step a thousand times, June stepped forward when he picked up the second runner, a longer one. He looped it around her waist, fed one of the back straps between her legs, and fastened the webbing in front with a pair of carabiners. With the final runner, he fashioned a similar sling for himself—a “diaper sling,” it was called.

  With the last pair of carabiners, he fastened himself to the two strands of rope just below where they passed through the runner. He donned his helmet and headlamp, pulled on his gloves, and looked at June for a final nod of approval.

  She spoke solemnly, like Obi-Wan to Luke Skywalker. “May the farts be with you,” she said. She spat again on her thumb and held it out toward him.

  The worry in her eyes that mingled with her excitement forced him to look away. “Farts be with you,” he affirmed, spitting onto his own thumb and rubbing it against hers.

  “Ugh,” they chimed.

  Dropping to all fours and dragging his pack behind him, he inched backward through the hole and into the world that waited below, doing his best to ignore the feeling of claustrophobia that struck him as his head slid beneath the surface.

  Almost at once, his feet touched the ground. The temperature dropped thirty degrees. A smell of rot, yet of burgeoning life, greeted his nostrils.

  Disappointed that the cave could be so small, yet still unable to control his excitement, he pulled on the rope to brake his descent and turned on his headlamp.

  The world that greeted his eyes was far from small. So large was it, and so profound, it induced an instant of vertigo. His feet rested on a slide of dirt and pebbles that slanted away from the hole at a thirty-degree angle. Five meters wide and three times as long, the slide ended in a world of darkness whose depths he could only imagine. His headlamp picked out shining spots here and there, as near as ten meters, as far, perhaps, as 90 or 100, the length of a football field and more. Ceiling upon ceiling of white and gold flashed back at him, like the towers and turrets of a medieval castle. Some of the ceilings flowed with curtains of dripping rock—theaters whose curtains had stuck partway down, stages trying to hide the next act from the eyes of this boy who had intruded upon its scene. Sound had vanished from his consciousness. In this world, only sight and smell existed. So silent was this world, he imagined its rock guardians and visionaries had stopped in mid-applause, their mouths open in timeless acclaim.

  Gunther tried to find his voice, swallowed, failed, then tried again.

  “June,” he cried out at last. “Oh, June…”

  From far above him, from another world, he thought he heard her voice. A shadow of movement crossed the cylinder of sun cast by the hole.

  “Gunther?”

  “June, you can’t believe it!” He wagged his head from side to side, as if she could see. “You just can’t believe it!”

  “I want to see!” she called down.

  “Five minutes. No, ten. Ten minutes and I’ll be back up.”

  “Okay.”

  Feeding the rope through the carabiners on his chest, he glissaded down the slide, holding tight to the rope so he wouldn’t slip. Despite his caution, the carpet below his feet sent a volley of pebbles ahead of him into the darkness. Like dice from a giant hand, the pebbles tumbled downward into a void he couldn’t see. A curtain of dust rose up around him.

  “Stop, stop!” he imagined the cavern crying out. “For a hundred thousand years we’ve not seen a human! You’re not welcome! Go away!”

  He stopped at what felt like the end of the stone carpet, hoping the dust would settle enough that June could experience the same pristine world he had. The dust hung in the air. The smell of exhaling
rock pierced his nostrils. Trying not to breathe, he listened to the silence, and thought he heard the tinkle of dripping water somewhere far away. His headlamp picked up white and red and brown images from below, all the images now strained through the filter of dust.

  He needed to descend deeper, to experience the next layer, and the layer beyond that. But further exploration would have to wait. He’d promised June the same vision. And he didn’t think his rope would reach the next level.

  Pulling on the rope, he guided his footsteps upward, back to the world of sunlight he’d left for so brief—yet so long—a time. June pulled on the rope with all her might. The face that met his as he popped his head out of the hole possessed eyes that bulged like moon rocks bleached by the sun.

  “Gunther…”

  “June. Oh, June. Oh…”

  CHAPTER 5

  At the dinner table, Gunther could do little more than pick at his peas and stab the pieces of meat with his fork. Over and over, he regrouped the meat into similar shapes. Squares. Rectangles. Rhomboids. No, this one belonged in the parallelogram group, not the rhomboid. And this one did not qualify as an equilateral triangle—sorry, dude, you’ve got to hover in the corner here with the dreaded Scalenes. They’ll carve you into Squares, sure as give you a square inch of territory.

  Recalling a scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he combed his mound of mashed potatoes into a replica of Devils Tower—which he’d seen only in photos—then squashed it down and refashioned it into a sorry image of the vision he’d seen in his cavern. His cavern—Gunther’s Cavern. The label was unfair—like a lot of things in this world. The cavern did not belong to him. It belonged as much to June as to him. And more than that, it belonged to Mankind. Still, he could think of it only as Gunther’s Cavern.

  “Gunther, what’s wrong?” his mother said.

  “Nothing, Mom.” He shot a glance at her, then shook his head, as if an errant strand of hair had blurred his vision. How did women pick up on the slightest quirks of your actions?