by Ashna Graves
Gene lay snoring on his back. Rather than wake him, Neva got to her feet, stiffly like an old woman, and went to stand below the source of the light, resting her hand directly in the glow as though in water. The slit in the ceiling was about three feet above her head and two feet wide, and rather than sky, she saw a chute of illuminated rock that angled enough to hide the hole or fissure at the upper end. She looked down at her shadowed body, back up at the slit, and down again. She might fit.
Gene was against it at first. Still groggy, peering up like a blinking badger, he croaked, “It’s way too small, Neva. I could get you up there, I think, but it’s way too small. What if you got stuck?”
“I used to do this kind of thing with Ethan,” she said with a fair imitation of confidence. “It’s called chimneying. If I can get into the crack I can inch my way up, I’m sure.”
Without another word, Gene half-squatted with his back against the tunnel wall and patted his slanting thighs, then offered his hands. She stepped onto his legs, wobbled, and grabbed for the lip of the opening. Her right fingers curled over a ridge of rock, her left found a crack in the chimney wall.
“Now step on my shoulder.”
“I don’t want to hurt your head.” Her hands did not want to grip the rock and her arms felt like string. She could not possibly pull herself into the opening, even with Gene lifting from below.
Disregarding her protest, he said, “I’m going to push you up by the legs and then let them go one at a time. Have you got a hand-hold?”
Recalling those long-ago sessions at Smith Rock with Ethan, when his love of geology first surfaced as a passion for rock climbing, she jammed her hand harder into the crack, tearing the skin. Gene’s arms went around her legs, he heaved, her head rose into the fissure followed by her shoulders. He released her left leg and she flailed wildly for an instant before her foot found the tunnel wall below the opening.
“Reach!” he barked.
Her right hand shot up the chute and scrabbled for a hold as she was shoved upward. Her right leg swung free and without thinking, she bent it, jamming her knee and foot against opposite sides of the chimney. Her hand gripped stone, her left forearm slammed flat against the vertical wall at her back—and there she was, lodged in the crack, her knee screaming, blood trickling down her wrist from her right hand. Pain, adrenaline, and then strange elation. She was not going to fall. She was strong, she had walked the ridges, swung an axe, packed water, swum every day. The rocks had hardened her and now she would use that hardness to conquer the rock.
Gene’s voice came from below, but it was too weak to make out the words.
She called down, “Try to rest but don’t lie in front of the door. I’m going to be opening it in a few minutes and you want to be out of the way.”
Her bravado brought no response.
Above her the fissure rose for about five feet without narrowing much, but then it bent out of sight. Just in front of her eyes a two-inch crack ran up the wall to the bend. She repositioned her right leg so her foot was where her knee had been, wedged the toe of her left foot into the crack, reached as high as she could overhead and jammed her left hand into the crack as well, and straightened her legs while she pulled from above. Her back hitched up the wall. Resting between moves, she crept up the fissure until she was just below the angle, and here she stopped for a longer rest.
Sweat streaked her face and soaked what was left of the dress. How could her body continue to produce sweat when she’d had no water since yesterday? She could not afford to sweat.
When she was ready to face what lay beyond the bend, she hitched upward again until she could see. The crack sloped gently for about twenty feet to a rectangle that framed glowing white rock and a slice of bright blue sky. Warm air touched her face, and with it came the exquisite smell of sagebrush.
With new energy she pushed herself up and around the bend until she half lay on her stomach, her chin on one hand as she studied the stretch of rock that lay between her and freedom. The crack narrowed close to the top, no question about that, though it appeared to widen again above a sort of bottleneck. Even here, where she lay, the crack was smaller than in the stretch below the bend behind her. She wriggled ahead, half climbing and half scooting along on her belly, the walls closing in. Soon, unable to bend her arms or legs, or put her head back far enough to see what was coming, she lay stretched out at full length with her hands reaching ahead, feeling the way.
Her right hand gripped a rim of rock. She had reached the narrow bit. Her left hand also took hold. She pulled until her elbows hit stone, then got her elbows through, followed by her head and armpits, her torso, her waist.
Her upper half was in a narrow funnel. Ahead, almost within reach, lay the bright outdoors, though she could see little apart from an overhanging rock. Resting with her eyes closed, she breathed in the smell of sun-baked stone. Then, moving slowly as though to sneak through, she pressed her hands against the funnel sides and drew her body up. Stone encircled her hips, hugging intimately like a familiar belt. She dropped her tailbone, tilted her pelvis, lifted her left hip and then the right. The left was above the rim but the right would not follow. She strained against the grip of stone, twisting, pulling with her arms and pushing upward with the one foot she could jam against the wall below.
She could not be stuck within sight and smell of freedom—stuck like a fishbone in the stone throat of the earth. Life doesn’t work this way. For several long minutes she lay still again, no longer struggling, willing her mind to be calm, to think about the shape of the stone and the shape of her body. Why couldn’t she have lost her hips rather than her breasts? A nice, neat hipectomy. Darla would slide right through, and so would Gene. An inch would do it.
The rock would not change, her hips would not change, but she could get rid of the dress and cotton underwear. She should have thought of this the first time through. Reversing direction, she pushed up against the stone walls now rather than down, wiggling and shifting until her hips broke free. She backed down all the way until she was below the hole, then tilted her head back and studied the irregular barrier of stone that would not let her pass. It looked large enough. She would have bet she could get through.
Her arms were still stuck overhead but by shifting around she was able to bend them, leaving the elbows pointing up and her hands down by her shoulders. Taking hold of the dress fabric with her fingertips, she pulled first on the front and then on the back while adjusting her body to free the cloth. Slowly, it gathered into two handfuls and cleared her hips, then made a thick roll just under her armpits. Twisting like a contortionist, she got the roll up over one arm and shoulder, then the other. She was about to pull it over her head and let it drop when she pictured herself arriving back at Gene’s side wearing nothing but shoes and socks. She let the dress hang from her neck like a big, rumpled bib.
The underwear was not so easy. With no way to get her hands down, she would have to use the abrasive surface of the wall to snag the elastic and drag it over her hipbones. Again and again she tried this, flattening one side of her waist against the rock and then the other, but the strong elastic refused to catch securely enough to roll over her hips. Her scraped skin burned but she barely noticed. Intent on the job, she retreated down the crack toward the bend where the rock was more irregular. Recalling one particularly sharp bit that had scraped her front, she felt for it with her foot, then lowered her body until her hips were below the protruding rock. She was just able to roll over onto her back. This made returning up the slope even slower and more difficult, but as she hoped, the elastic caught on the rock and stayed there while she inched her way up again. The material stretched down below her buttocks but the top edge remained trapped in the hollows above her hipbones, strained tight across her belly.
She lay still, afraid that any more stress on the elastic would tear it loose from the rock. After a bit, barely breathing, she edged her hips toward the left wall of the crack, tilted her pelvis slightly to g
et her side flat against stone, and slid upward half an inch. The elastic caught on the rough surface. Another half inch. And another.
The material cleared her left hipbone and slid several inches down toward her leg. She shifted to the right side of the chute, repeated the maneuver, and the underwear snapped down around her thighs, and slid down her legs. She kicked them off, furiously, hating them, and already turning onto her belly to wriggle back up the crack.
Again her arms, head, and torso cleared the stone lip, again her hips touched on all sides. She turned, twisted, and pulled while shoving upward from below. One hipbone scraped through and then the other, but the wide fleshy part below the bones would not clear. Resting her forehead against rock, she breathed slowly, and thought about buttocks. Skin, fat, blood vessels, muscle. The muscle she had worked so hard to strengthen was knotted with tension. Stone won’t give, bone won’t give, but flesh is malleable, flesh and muscle can relax, soften, change shape, and move. She was sitting on the cabin porch reading, at peace with the universe, no tension anywhere, every muscle in her body at ease, face, neck, shoulders, arms, belly, butt, a butt of Jell-O, soft, formless, yielding…she slipped through the hole, amoeba-like, boneless and flowing.
***
Neva lay flat with the sun on her back, her feet still in the shadow of the boulder that overhung the hole. Her body was heavy and unresponsive, but after a few minutes’ rest, she struggled into a sitting position, put her arms through the sleeves of the dress, and knotted it again across her bloody chest. Was there a square inch anywhere without scrapes and cuts? All she wanted was to find water, to drink as she had never drunk before and then get in. She would swim across the pond without a second’s thought.
How long had she been in the crack? Hours or minutes? She had no idea, but there was no time to spare now. Gene was still down there, alone in the dark, starving and dehydrated. She turned back to the hole to call down to him, and saw something she had missed as she heaved herself out into freedom. Sitting back a few feet from the opening, half-hidden by a large rock, was a wooden crate. There wasn’t room under the overhanging boulder to stand up, and it was too painful to crawl, so she managed to scoot on her feet while crouching until she could read the label.
Dynamite?
Dynamite!
Her heart beat with sudden violence, and adrenaline worked on her system like coffee. Her thoughts cleared as she backed away and looked more carefully at the escape hole. Rocks, sticks, and sand were heaped and scattered around it. Someone had dug it out recently, had cleared the accumulated debris from the mouth of the crack. Someone was preparing it for their own purposes and without these efforts, she would not have seen daylight shining in, would not have known the crack was there.
Darrell had said they were preparing to move to a new mine closer to Elkhorn. He was getting the tunnel ready to blow up. He was going to blow it up with her and Gene inside.
“Gene!” she called down the hole, her voice hard with fury. “Gene! I’m out, I’m coming to get you.”
There was no answer but she had expected none.
The dress hung on her like a tattered sarong as she set off walking downhill, her steps stiff but as rapid as she could manage. It was late morning, very still apart from the buzzards that circled overhead, and it struck her that they were directly above the fissure into the tunnel, lazing in the updraft. Horrible—but death and vultures go together. It was no fault of the birds.
The mine entrance looked just as it had the day she found it. Filling her lungs with sweet air, she wrapped her arms around her shoulders and walked in without allowing time for fear or revulsion. The cave-in was around the first bend, and enough light reached it to show the reeking mound of a packrat nest against one end of the tumbled stone wall. At the other end stood a second crate of dynamite, and above it was a line of freshly drilled holes.
She took these in with a glance, then set to work. The supposed cave-in was a masterful assemblage of tunnel debris, including rock, rusted iron spikes, roof poles, and random chunks of old metal, all fused into a solid mass with cement that she saw only because she knew it was there. The door, on the end opposite the packrat nest, was disguised as a wooden pallet embedded in a section of rubble. Timbers along both sides served as a rough doorframe, and two depressions along the left side could indicate recessed hinges. There was no evident latch, but it had to be well hidden or any wandering kid or miner might find it.
Concentrating on the right side of the door, away from the probable hinges, Neva repeated the same probing, twisting and pulling they’d attempted on the inside. Again nothing moved, even when she beat on the protrusions with a rock. At last she sank down onto her heels and fixed an angry and despairing look on the impenetrable barrier that separated her from Gene Holland, a man she barely knew but who was now the most important person on earth. She had hoped to hear some answering knocks in response to her pounding, but there was not a sound.
But there were sounds. An agitated scrabbling and squeaking came from the nest. She had stirred up the natives, it seemed—but how did the packrat stink penetrate so powerfully to the other side of the wall? Though there had been no nest over there, there were signs of rats. Rats would not come and go by way of the ceiling crack.
Neva stretched out on her belly and began feeling her way along the bottom of the wall. A foot to the right of the door a round stone protruded about six inches beyond anything else, and under it her hand discovered an opening. Without pausing for thought, she thrust her hand in and struck something hard, but even as her face tensed with pain she grasped the metal ring and pulled. There was a simple click and the door moved.
Gene lay curled on his side by the charred remains of the fire, his eyes closed. She knelt and touched his shoulder.
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Sorry it took so long, but that story can wait. Can you get up?”
“No.”
“Will you try?”
“No point.”
“I might be able to pull you out into the fresh air.”
“Just leave it open. Bring water.”
“Yes, water and food. It shouldn’t take long to get to the cabin and back. I’ll bring the car as far as I can. You just have to hang on a little longer.”
“Sure.”
She kissed his bruised cheek, got to her feet, checked the stone that held the door open, and left the tunnel.
Later, she could not recall the trip back to the cabin. It was a blank, an empty spot in her mind, but she would never forget the first drink of water from the bucket on the counter. Tepid from sitting for days in the warm cabin, it was sweet syrup on her throat. She ladled water over her face and arms, letting it run onto the floor, then drank again. She stuffed raisins into her mouth by the handful. Stale crackers were next, but they stuck in her throat. She seized a can of V-8 juice, ripped off the tab and chugged it.
The cabin must be safe for the moment since she was trapped in the tunnel as far as Darrell and his father knew, but nowhere on the creek felt safe, and she was aware of every outdoor sound as she took off the dress for the last time and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. To be properly dressed again should have been a relief, but her scratched, unwashed body shrank from the rough cloth. Had Gene not been waiting in the tunnel, nothing could have kept her out of the pond.
She put a bottle of water in a bag, added juice, prunes, and two cans of sardines, cast a regretful look around the cabin, and went out to the car. The road to the spur and the spur itself were rutted but easily passable with the wheels on the high spots. She turned around at the far end of the spur and parked facing the way out before heading uphill on foot. The mining tunnel was less than a hundred yards through the sagebrush along a well worn trail. As she climbed, her dread returned full force, but when she caught sight of the tunnel entrance she cried out with joy. “Gene!”
The miner sat propped against a rock in the sun. He lifted his right hand and splayed the first two fingers in the shap
e of a V.
***
They didn’t have the energy to talk much on the trip back to the cabin, though they did decide on a simple plan. They would load Neva’s car with basic gear in case they had to camp, and then head for the top of the drainage and try to get the Honda down the other side of the creek to the Dry River Valley. There was no danger of meeting Darrell over there, and not much chance of meeting one of the Cotters.
“They have to be involved,” Neva said. “They must work for the Guptills. When Lance left me at the cabin, he obviously knew where to find Darrell to tell him I was there. It makes me sick to say it, but I think Reese must have killed Roy. Darrell isn’t up to straight murder, and Lance, well, no one would trust him with such a job.”
“It’s really too bad,” Gene said with a mournful shake of the head. “I’ve always liked Reese Cotter. He’s one of the few good miners under forty.”
“I don’t understand why they left Roy in the pit.”
“Less suspicious. You can’t have everybody disappearing out here. What I can’t figure is why they risked putting us in the tunnel, especially you. It would have brought out the bloodhounds for sure.”
“I don’t understand why they bothered with me at all. I was no threat.”
“They couldn’t know that. The way you wandered around and asked so many questions. And you did stumble on the truck.”
“It seems a long way to haul bodies.”
“There aren’t many good tunnels around anymore. A Guptill uncle or cousin owns a place down past Angus, so they would have known the canyon. I must be a complete idiot. It’s been under my nose all these years.”
Neva again pulled up as close to the cabin door as she could. Gene rested on the chopping block, keeping watch while she went inside to throw the gear together. The first thing she saw was the pot of water she’d placed on the camp stove while pretending to make coffee for Darrell. She had been too intent on food and water to notice it earlier, but now the thought of coffee made her go weak in the knees. Coffee would keep her going for hours, even if they had to leave the car and continue on foot. Moving fast, she poured more water into the pot from the jug on the counter, lit the single propane burner, and spooned grounds into the filter that was already waiting in the cone. While the water heated, she stuffed food and bedding into two boxes and set them on the kitchen porch with a wave at Gene to indicate that they were ready to load.