Refresh Refresh

by Benjamin Percy

  Right then he hears his wife, Becca, her car grumbling up the driveway, as she returns home from the community college where she teaches. He hears her keys jangle, her footsteps on the porch, in the hallway. She calls out his name and he says, “In here.” She begins to say something, something about the garage door failing to open, her voice cut short by a sharp intake of air when she sees the bleeding fridge.

  “Power’s out,” he says and she gives him a tight-faced look that trembles at the mouth from her teeth taking tiny bites from her cheeks. He can sense her anger coming and it makes him feel as if he is shrinking, small enough to put in his own pocket. “I just got home,” he says, his voice coming out in an almost whine. “Like, five seconds ago. I was just about to start cleaning.”

  She hurls down her keys. Against the Formica counter they make a noise like bottles breaking. “Great,” she says. “That’s just great. That’s just what I need.” She lifts her arms and lets them fall and stomps her way from the kitchen, into the hallway, bringing down her high heels as if to stab something with every step. He can hear her muttering to herself as she burrows roughly through the closet. A moment later she returns with an armful of beach towels. She throws them down at the base of the fridge and tells him to get the cooler.

  “The cooler?”

  “Yes, the fucking cooler,” she says. “You know, the cooler.”

  He retrieves it from the garage and with some hesitation sets it on top of the towels, watching his wife as he does so, hoping this is where she wants it. She says nothing. She will not look at him. All her attention, this radiant anger he has come to know so well, is momentarily focused on the fridge. For this he is thankful.

  These days she is always angry, it seems. All it takes is a dropped dish, the wrong word, heavy traffic, and a switch goes off inside her that sends blue electricity sizzling through her veins.

  He retreats from her and crosses his arms, his hands tucked into his armpits. For a moment his wife stares at the freezer, her head cocked, as if listening to something in the far distance. He watches her back, the rigidity of it. A long brown ponytail curls down her spine like an upside-down question mark.

  And then she suddenly brings her hand to the freezer door and pulls. At first it resists her, and so she brings her other hand to the handle and leans backward. Then, with a sort of sucking, sort of gasping noise, it opens.

  The sight of it reminds Kevin of the time he had his wisdom teeth removed. His dentist had given him an irrigator, a plastic syringe. Twice a day he filled it with salt water and placed its needle into the craters at the back of his mouth—and from them, in a pink rush, came scabs, bits of food. That is what the freezer looks like when its door opens and the blood surges from it—all down the front of the fridge, dampening their photos, glossing over their magnets, until the front of the fridge has more red on it than white.

  Becca makes a noise like a wounded bird. She turns her head away from the mess and squints shut her eyes. Her pants, her shoes are splattered with red. A tremble races through her body and then she goes perfectly still.

  Kevin goes to her and places a hand on her shoulder and her shoulder drops a little from the weight of it. He feels as if he is touching a banister, a rifle stock, something hard and unbending. “Let me do it,” he says. “Please.”

  The kitchen is loud with the noise of dripping.

  “I hate this house,” she says, her voice a harsh whisper. “I hate, hate, hate this house.”

  “You go sit down and I’ll take care of it. You rest. You need your rest.”

  She raises her arm, long and thin, her hand gloved with blood, like a stop sign. She will not speak to him, mute with a kind of fury.

  “Sorry,” he says and his hand falls away from her when she bends over to reposition the cooler. And then, with her arms out as if to hug, she reaches into the freezer. There is a surprising amount of meat in there and she hooks her arms around it, the pile of it, and slides it out all at once. The T-bones, pork chops, bratwursts, chicken breasts splat into the cooler, one on top of the other, a mass of meat along with two ice trays and a sodden box of baking soda. A hamburger patty misses its mark and plops on the linoleum, making a red flower pattern.

  By this time Kevin has removed from beneath the sink a sponge, a roll of paper towels, a Clorox spray bottle. His wife watches him when he tears off five lengths of paper towels and lays them in the freezer to soak up the blood pooled there. “That’s not enough,” she says and snatches the towels from him and lays down several more sheets. “Just let me do it.”

  He pinches shut his mouth and drops his eyes and holds up his hands, palms flat, as if pressing them against a wall. “Okay.”

  She plucks the photos and magnets from the fridge and tosses them in the cooler. Then she kneels with a bouquet of paper towels in one hand and the bottle of Clorox in the other. At first, when she sprays, when she wipes, she only smears the blood, making it pinker, making swirls like you see in hair and wood grain. Then the blood begins to come away and the fridge begins to look like a fridge again.

  Thirty minutes later, when she at last finishes, she says, “There.” She is damp with sweat, with gore. She runs a forearm across her forehead and takes a deep, shuddering breath. Her blouse, once beige, now clings to her redly, pinkly, in tie-dye designs. She strips it off and tosses it in the cooler, along with her skirt, her bra and panties. Her shoes she sets aside. Naked, she goes to the sink and runs the water and soaps up her arms and feet and splashes her face and when she turns toward Kevin her face is calmer, paler, drained of its previous flush.

  “Sorry I snapped at you,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” he says, raising his voice so it follows her down the hallway, to their bedroom, their bathroom, where she will climb into the shower and leave behind a pink ring at the bottom of the tub as she did several months ago when she began to hemorrhage, when she lost the baby.

  The power went out because of the cave.

  The cave—a lava tube—runs beneath their house, their neighborhood, and beyond, a vast tunnel that once carried in it molten rock the color of an angry sun.

  People say Central Oregon looks like another planet. Mars maybe. The reddish blackish landscape is busy with calderas, cinder cones, lava blisters, pressure ridges, pressure plateaus—much of it the hardened remains of basalt, a lava that spreads quickly, like thin porridge, flowing sometimes seventy miles, its front fed by lava tubes, like their lava tube, one of so many that network the ground beneath Bend, Redmond, La Pine.

  Sometimes the caves collapse. A tractor-trailer will be growling along Route 97 when the asphalt opens up—just like that, like a mouth—and the rig will vanish, crashing down into an unknown darkness. Or someone will go to their driveway and find it gone, along with their car, their johnboat, replaced by a gaping hole. Or a hard rain will come, dampening and loosening those unseen joints beneath the surface that send the ground buckling. Imagine five acres dropping several inches, maybe even a foot, in an instant. Imagine fissures opening in your lawn. Imagine ­septic tanks splintering, sewage bubbling up from the ground like oil. Imagine power lines pinched off and neighborhoods darkened for days.

  It’s upsetting, not trusting the ground beneath your feet.

  Their house is part of a new development called Elk Mound. It is located on a spur of basalt overlooking a coulee crowded with juniper trees that deepens and widens on its way south to accommodate the spring-fed Newberry River that winds through the Aubrey Glen Golf Course on its way toward Bend, just five miles south of them.

  Theirs was the last house in the development to sell, a year ago. It had been built over the mouth of the cave. To pass inspection and ensure no vertical settlement the contractor widened the foundation, bolting it to the bedrock with twenty Perma Jack brackets. The realtor advertised the cave as a “natural basement with cooling properties.”

  In the living room there is an insulated steel door. Somehow, through the cracks around it, the breath o
f the cave finds its way in, smelling faintly of mushrooms, sulfur, cellar-floor puddles. Beyond the door a steel staircase, nearly forty feet tall, descends into darkness.

  Becca teaches in the Geology Department at Central Ore­gon Community College. She often wears her hair pulled back in a ponytail and khaki pants with many zippered compartments. She keeps a special toothbrush by the sink to scrub away the crescents of dirt that seem always to gather beneath her fingernails. In everyday conversation she uses words like igneous, tetrahedron, radar-mapping. The cave, to her, was the equivalent of a trampoline or fire pole to a child. It was cool. “I know I ought to know better,” she said with a smile, when they signed the deed and bought the place for a song.

  Three years ago Kevin met Becca when skiing at Mt. Bachelor. She was standing at the summit of the mountain, at the top of a mogul field, when he slid off the chairlift. It was her honey-colored hair that first caught his attention. The wind blew it every which way, so that with the blue sky all around her she looked as if she were underwater. She wore this white outfit that stole the breath from his chest. He unwrapped a PowerBar and hungrily ate it. When she still hadn’t moved five minutes later, he approached her.

  He asked if she was okay, thinking she might be afraid of the long drop before her, but she only looked at him curiously, completely unafraid, and said, “I’m fine,” with the breath trailing from her mouth.

  To their north the spine of the Cascade Range continued with the Three Sisters rising through a thin layer of clouds like gnarled vertebrae. Becca pointed her pole at the saddle-shaped place between the South and Middle Sister and said, “I’m just studying that moraine over there.”

  He had never heard that word before—moraine—and it made him picture a great flood of water, frozen in its tracks.

  Then she adjusted her goggles and gave him a smile and took off down the mountain, her skis arranged in a careful pie wedge that curled the powder over, exposing in her wake a broad zigzagging track of blue. He followed, and one thing led to another.

  There was a time, not even five months ago, when she would sneak up behind him and pinch his butt and yell, “You’re it!” and run from him, squealing as he chased her through their new house, over the couch, under the dining-room table, finally catching her in bed with his hands made into crab claws that touched her roughly all over.

  Afterwards they would drink beer and watch the Late Show and she would laugh with her head thrown back, smiling so widely he could see her back teeth, her fillings giving off a silvery light.

  They were pretty happy.

  Then she was late. A few days passed, then a week, then two weeks, before she sent Kevin to the pharmacy. By this time she knew because she had always been like clockwork, had never been this late. But she wanted to be certain. She wanted some bit of proof she could point to and say, “There.”

  In Aisle 5 the shelves were crowded with dozens of pink boxes. Not understanding the differences between them he randomly selected one—an expensive one with a picture of a rose garden on it—and on his way to the register he grabbed a pack of gum, a Butterfinger, an Us Weekly, trying to clutter the register with other things. The checkout girl wore blue eye shadow. He thought it made her look very sad.

  At home, when he handed his wife the box, she turned it over and scrunched her eyebrows and read its back as if for nutritional information. “Is this even a good one?” she asked and he said, “Yes. It’s very reliable.” He leaned toward her and tapped the place on the box where it read 98% Accurate!

  This seemed to satisfy her and she went into the bathroom with the kit and closed the door, and he could hear the cardboard tearing, could hear her swearing when she peed a little on her hand, could hear the muffled roar of the toilet when she finished.

  There was a lengthy silence and then she emerged from the bathroom. She had a plastic stick in her hand and she was shaking it and looking at it between shakes like an undeveloped Polaroid.

  “Well?” he said.

  She looked at him with a blank expression and held onto the stick a second longer before handing it to him. He took it with two hands and brought it close to his face. At the end of the stick, in a tiny window frame, there was a plus sign. It was an absurd shade of pink—the kind of pink little girls favored in their dresses and bubblegum. “Plus means what?”

  “Plus means pregnant,” she said.

  His eyes grew larger and he felt at once light-headed and ebullient and fearful. “You’re kidding me?”

  She pressed her hands hard against her face. “I am not kidding you.”

  “You’re shitting me?”

  “I am not shitting you,” she said and looked at him through her fingers. “I’m serious.”

  Kevin, openmouthed, considered her. “You’re ­serious.”

  “I’m being seriously serious. We’re having a goddamn baby.”

  Kevin works at the foundry, the Redmond Foundry, which produces over 200 alloys. It is a high-ceilinged cinder-block building whose interior is black with dust and red with fire. All around him men wear heavy leather aprons and canvas gloves and tinted goggles. One of his main tasks is shaking-out—breaking up sand castings to get at the metal castings cooling and hardening within them. His sledgehammer is like an extension of his body. When he leaves work his hands are still curled in the shape of it. All through the day he swings it again and again until the weight is nearly impossible to bear, until his face goes as red as the liquid metal glowing all around him and his veins rise jaggedly from his arms. When he swings, his breath goes rip-rip-rip and the hammer blasts open the sand casting with a crack. A cloud of particles rises from it and sticks to his sweat. And there is the alloy, like a fossil fallen out of mud, to toss in a nearby bin.

  Sometimes, if someone calls in sick, he’ll work the induction furnace or the electric arc furnace, getting clamps in the right places, arranging molds, making sure they’re free of dirt, and then pouring into them the hot metal that looks so much like lava.

  His wife thinks he should go back to school—he is capable of so much more, she says—but the pay is good and nobody bothers him and he likes the rhythm of the work, the mindless repetition.

  Weekends, they used to explore the cave. They would throw on their jeans and fleece and tie their hiking boots tight and descend into the darkness with their Magnum flashlights throwing cones of light before them. Down here no birds chirped, no dogs barked, no planes growled overhead. Occasionally the cave would pass beneath a road and they could hear the traffic humming above them, but otherwise, their noise was the only thing. Their footsteps, shooshing through black sand or clunking off rocks, seemed so loud. And so they spoke in whispers. And when they spoke—saying, “What was that?” or “Watch your step,” or “I love how old everything smells down here. It smells like it’s a hundred million years old”—their breath fogged from their mouths.

  When a vein of quartz would catch the light, Becca would put her hands to it. The rock would be slick and streaked pink and white, like bacon. She would remove from her backpack a pick and hand it to Kevin and he would swing it in a short arc and chip some of the quartz from the wall. And she would collect it to take home and stack neatly across her bureau, across bookshelves and windowsills, so that after a while their house seemed to glitter from every corner­.

  The cave branched off into narrow corridors, scarcely wider than the Korean hatchback Kevin drove, but the main tube reached thirty, forty yards across, like the hollowed passage of an enormous worm. They wondered if it had an end.

  Sometimes the blackness would go gray and they would click off their flashlights and pick their way through the gloom until they came upon a sort of skylight, where the roof of the cave had collapsed and now let in the sun. One time they found a dog—a German shepherd—hanging from such a hole. It had been lynched by its leash, its leash tethered to something aboveground and out of sight, perhaps a tree. And the dog dangled there, spot­lit by the sun, turning around and around.
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br />   There were things—a far-off moaning, a bundle of bones, a dark shape scuttling just past the reach of their flashlight—that scared them. Rocks scared them. Rocks cluttered the cave floor, some of them the size of melons, others the size of elk. For this reason they bought REI spelunking helmets. Sometimes the ceiling would come loose with a click of stone, a hiss of dirt, nearly noiseless in its descent, but when it slammed to the cave floor, it roared and displaced a big block of air that made them cry out and clutch each other in a happy sort of terror.

  But that was before.

  Becca doesn’t like to go down in the cave anymore. Not since the day in July when the bats came. It was early evening, and they were sprawled out on the couch watching Wheel of Fortune. At that time she was four months’ pregnant and her belly was beginning to poke out enough that women would stop her in the grocery store and ask. She needed a safety pin to fasten the jeans she wore now. He was drinking a Bud Light and she was drinking water. She let in enough liquid to visibly fill her cheeks, and then swallowed in tiny portions, her cheeks growing smaller and smaller until sunken. He liked watching her drink. She drank water as if it were wine, not as a necessity but as a pleasure, trying to make it last longer. She looked at him looking at her and said, “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “That.”

  He picked up the remote and hit the mute button and the applause of the audience fell away and a hush descended upon the room. He heard nothing and said as much.