by Margo Catts
I nodded automatically. But I didn’t believe her.
“And I think you can let go of that boy now,” she added.
“Oh.” I released his arm, which he emphasized with a twist as if to prove he’d escaped rather than been freed.
“I’ll be waiting for you back home,” she said.
Scott’s father rejoined us. He had a flashlight in his hand, though it wasn’t dark enough to need one.
“Come on,” he said. “Scott, take us where you were playing.”
“Thank you,” I said. The fight had drained out of me, leaving me with nothing but a mouthful of dread.
He nodded. “I’m Frank.”
“Elena.”
“Yeah, I figgered.”
We trudged the rest of the way up the street in a wary, long-armed triangle. The pavement ended against grit and rubble, and a faint path appeared, wending up the hillside. Scott led us along it, behind the hill, into a sprawl of ragged land, tufted with sagebrush clumps and dry grasses and edged by sharp-needled pines. Sun still touched the trees, but the ground was in shadow.
“Where’d you dig, son?” Frank said. It struck me as an odd question. I would’ve asked Scott to detail the afternoon, where they played, what they’d done, and where the children were when he parted ways with them.
The boy shrugged. “I dunno. Around.”
“Show me where you dug.”
Something inscrutable passed between them, and the boy slumped off across the sage, bearing slightly to the left. He stopped at a hollowed spot behind some rocks, circled by crushed and rusted beer cans.
“We dug here, some.”
“There’s no fresh marks. Now show me where you dug today.”
The boy set off along the same line. But not before he shot me another look, and this time I saw something different in him—fear. As invisible as radio waves, it carried into the air on a frequency I was already tuned to. I tried to pull back the breath that escaped me, then followed these strangers across the darkening field, staggering over the rocks and sagebrush roots.
At the line of trees, Scott kept going. The pitch grew steeper, and my breath started to shorten. Then he stopped and pointed to a jumble of rocks that sprouted pine saplings and buckthorn a short distance ahead.
“Over there,” he said.
His father pushed past him. I’d fallen behind and stumbled to catch up as Frank dropped to his knees, doubling onto his hands near the rocks as if he was about to throw up. Then the flashlight turned on.
“Kevin!” he called to the ground. “Sarah! Answer me! Kids! Are you okay?”
I caught up in time to see him turn his head over his shoulder toward his son, his hands braced apart at the edge of a hole, an aurora of flashlight marking its opposite edge, and even in the shadows I could see a terrifying hybrid of fury and fear in his face.
“What did you do?”
“I—we—were just messing around.”
In one motion the father came to his feet and grabbed the boy by the arm. “Did they go down there? Both of them?”
“Kevin did. He wanted to! We didn’t make him!”
“What are you talking about? What’s happened?” My voice wasn’t my own, and they didn’t seem to hear me.
“Did Sarah go down, too?”
“I dunno.”
“Was she here when Kevin went down?”
A pause. Then slowly, a nod.
“And you left.” It wasn’t a question.
“What happened?” Still no one paid any attention to me.
“He prob’ly just climbed out!”
“Were you using a rope? And you took it?”
A nod.
“Then he couldn’t climb out!”
This time I screamed. I couldn’t help it. “What are you saying?”
Frank steadied himself and turned toward me. “It’s a stope from an old mine—a spot where the mine got close to the surface. They cave in and open up from time to time. It doesn’t sound like it’s too deep, but they’re not answering. We don’t know if Sarah went down there, too, but I’m guessing she did. You stay here and keep calling. I’m going to get help.”
Iced fingers closed around my throat. “Why aren’t they answering?”
“I don’t know. They probably wandered off. We’ll find them.”
But he didn’t meet my eyes as he said it. Instead, he shoved the flashlight into my hand. “Keep the light shining down. And keep calling.”
He twisted his son around and together the two of them crunched away into the twilight.
24
Kevin? Sarah? I’m right here. Are you okay?”
I feared the silence, so only a few moments would pass before I’d call again.
“Kevin? Sarah? Can you hear me? We’re coming after you. We’re getting you out.”
And again. And again. The sky faded. Grit dug into my forearms and my knees cramped. My light shone on the loose rock down the hole, but the angle was such that I couldn’t see the bottom. A faint draft rising out of the hole carried the musky scent of earth and dust.
“Sarah, honey? Can you hear me? Kevin? Say something back to me. We need to know where you are.”
As the sky deepened to indigo, I heard steps crunching toward me. I turned on my hip to see overlapping circles of light stuttering across the ground.
“Elena?”
“What is it? Have you found them?”
“Not yet. It’s Frank. I brought help. These are the first guys from mine rescue teams. The others are getting ready right now. Have you heard anything?”
“No.”
They’d reached my side, but I didn’t get up. Instead I called down the hole again.
“Kevin? Sarah? We’re right here!” I turned to the boots beside me, more than I could count in a glance. I craned my neck to look up.
Frank offered a hand to help me stand. “Here,” he said. “Let’s let these guys take a look.”
I staggered to my feet and four other men closed around the opening. A few murmured words and then a column of light aimed at the hole blinded me. I’d never seen anything that bright. I squinted and turned my face away. A radio crackled.
“Dan? We’re here. It’s on.”
I turned to Frank. “What’s happening?”
“It looks like this is an old silver mine, probably stopped operating seventy or eighty years ago. Somebody’s at the main entrance right now, trying to see the light. There’s an old guy with ’em. His dad used to work here, and he was in it some before it got closed up. Says he’s pretty sure it connects but it’s not a straight shot and the light won’t show. If it does, they’ll know for sure they can walk in that way. If not, they’ll have to take his word for it. But it’d probably still be better than digging out this hole, since we know the kids aren’t here anyway.”
My voice swung up an octave. “So no one’s even gone in yet?”
“Elena, we don’t know what’s down there. The maps for it look like a pile of string, and they probably don’t show everything anyway. The kids could go ten yards in the dark, turn around, and be completely lost. Anybody could. We need to let professionals do this right.”
Another crackle. “Ten-four. Nope, nothing. Emmett says told you so.”
My knees loosened. I was afraid I’d fall. Kevin and Sarah could be anywhere. Underground. Trapped. Lost in the dark. Cave-ins. Drop-offs. Dark water. Poison gas. Flashes from every movie or TV show I’d ever seen involving people trapped in a mine swirled around each other, forming a widening, enveloping, terrifying mass.
“It was your kid that did this!” I cried.
He spoke far more calmly than I deserved. “Scott said him and the other boys dared Kevin and ditched him. He explained everything to the police. It was wrong, but it’s what boys do. Kids around here get taught about not going in mines the same way kids in Kansas get tornado drills. Kevin heard it just as much as Scott did and he knew he shouldn’t go down there. Kids’ll be stupid. Now we’re gonna find the
m and fix it.”
Fix it. I looked at the men around the hole, silhouettes squatting over a rectangle of paper bleached like bone in the light. How many more men were gathered now at the entrance? There had been phone calls, men pulling on boots and leaving their homes, trucks bouncing through town, now lights and radios and maps, all to save Kevin and Sarah from my poor decisions. Could this be fixed, even with the whole town trying? The fault was mine, and like a coward, I’d tried to throw blame over a boy. Yet his father had just taken it gently and set it aside.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Thank you.”
Three of the men stood.
“Miss Alvarez?” The man who spoke to me wore an unadorned ball cap and a dark T-shirt stretched tight over a barrel chest. He had a small mouth with a prominent lower lip that made him look like a younger, fitter Alfred Hitchcock. He stuck out a hand for me to shake, which I took automatically. “Alan House,” he said.
His hand was wide and dry, whereas mine felt vaguely tingly and somehow outside my control.
“I’m the captain. More guys are on the way. As soon as I have enough, we’ll go in. We’re getting our communications post set up by the portal. Frank will take you there. Chris”—he gestured over his shoulder with his thumb to the remaining man, now unfolding a lawn chair by the light— “is going to stay right here with a radio, so if the kids turn up here we’ll know about it right away. Sound good?”
“Yes, sir,” I lied. I could tell I was dealing with an honest-to-God grown-up who was used to being in charge, but there was no way I was going to sit on a rock, waiting, while other people looked for Kevin and Sarah.
“Good.” He tucked the rolled map under his arm, and I followed their bobbing flashlights back out to the street, picking my way over the uneven ground in the dark. I got into Frank’s car without saying anything else. There was no small talk to be made. Besides, I felt painfully out of place, more like one of the children in this drama than one of the adults—losing my charges in the first place, having petulant outbursts, doing what I was told while adults solved the problems, and finally following somebody else’s dad to his car so he could drive me where I needed to go.
We drove downhill toward the center of town for a few blocks, then uphill and onto a dirt road that crested and then dove into a winding ravine. A few hundred more yards and I saw a pool of light in a wide spot in the road—pickup trucks shoved hard against the uphill slope, lamps, canopies strung from trees and posts, and a dizzying array of people and equipment. Bending, carrying, tinkering, talking. My fingers clenched the edge of the seat as Frank edged his car against the tailgate of one of the trucks. Gratitude twined with terror. So many to help. So many needed. And me, responsible for it all, about to step into the midst of it.
Alan slammed the door of his own truck as I stood. He put a hand on my shoulder and steered me toward one of the canopies.
“The mine entrance is just past the trucks here, straight into the mountain. The place they went in is on the other side of the hill. Not close, but we’ll find them. You’ll wait right here, and somebody will be with you the whole time.”
“No—I’m going in.”
He nodded, nonplussed. I might as well have said, “I want a sweater.”
“I understand,” he said. “But this isn’t like a highway tunnel. If we’re going to help those kids, we can’t be taking care of you.”
A hand on my other shoulder interrupted me before I could argue.
“Hey, how are you doing?”
I turned and stared, my bruised brain unable for a moment to place him in this setting. “Leo?”
He turned to point at one of the clusters of men. “My uncle is on one of the teams. He called me to stay with you.”
“How’d he know—”
“Elena, everybody knows. The rescue guys have a calling tree, and when it’s kids—” He nodded. “Well, people want to help.”
“I want to help. I want to go with them.”
“There’s nothing you can do. You’d slow them down. Let them just do their job.”
“Would they let you go?”
He tilted his head a little. “Probably. Maybe. But I’ve done some mining and safety training. It’s all about whether the captain thinks a person can handle themselves and not get in the way—” He shrugged. “Maybe.”
Alan had disappeared while we’d been talking. I scanned the clusters of men. There. I grabbed Leo’s hand and pulled him with me.
“Mr.— Alan.” He looked up. Other men in hard hats continued twisting valves, and little jets of air seemed to be telling me to shhh. “You know who those kids are, right? Their mom just died a few months ago, and their dad is gone. They’ve got nobody. They’ve gotta be so scared. There’s just me—I have to go with you.”
I sounded so calm to myself, so reasonable. I felt frantic. If he’d asked to touch my hand he would have found it cold and shaking. But he didn’t. And he also didn’t say no fast enough to stop me from continuing.
“Leo will come with me. He says he knows what to do. He’ll keep me out of trouble, and I won’t slow you down at all. I promise—if you say to stop or turn around, I will.”
His eyes narrowed. He looked at me for a moment longer, then looked at Leo.
“What’s her story?”
I looked at Leo, panicked. What did he mean?
“She’s Tuah’s granddaughter. Eduardo Alvarez was her granddad.”
“She got a good head?”
Did I? What did that mean? Why, why did Leo’s last vision of me have to include me going to pieces over a campfire?
He studied me for a moment, then looked at Alan again. “She’s pretty tough.”
“We’re following the air. You know what that means?”
“Yes, sir.”
Alan finally spoke to me. “I’m only doing this because the air looks good. We’ll be checking as we go, and advance a fresh air base every time we’re sure we can. You can go as far as that, as long as you stay in line. The minute anything looks funny, or you make anybody pay attention to you, instead of those kids and our own safety, he’s taking you out. Understand?”
“Yes, sir. Absolutely.”
Alan held up a single finger, frowning so that his lower lip stood out even more. “One chance,” he said. “You get one chance.”
*
“One!”
“Check.”
“Two!”
“Check.”
“Three!”
Six men counted off. Little bursts of compressed air, tugs of belts, nods of heads. After Alan was a man who had been introduced to me as Dom, responsible for reading and revising the map. Bob, with a massive spool of wire, was the radio man. Stan was a medic. A man named Ramon was referred to as the “gas man,” whose job, Leo said, was to test the air. Another two men, Ted and Rick, had a stretcher that carried tools, a first aid kit, more communications wire, and inexplicably, a roll of burlap and another of clear plastic. I tried to focus on the items on the stretcher and not think about any other uses for it.
Like the men, I wore a hard hat with a lamp, connected by wire to a battery pack that pulled the waistband of my jeans. A gas mask hung around my neck, and a backpack with steel bottles of air dragged down against my shoulders.
“Leo? Elena?” I felt a tug against the straps, a twist, a release.
“Check,” Leo said.
Another team was going through parallel checks a few yards away. They would wait outside until called to widen the search, or to replace or rescue us. More men sat on truck bumpers or milled around a folding table, and a few more clumped around the radio unit where the wire connected to ours began. Low voices. An occasional car door slam. Carafes of coffee. Jugs of water. Uneven mounds of more backpacks, more tools, more straps and bags and tarps and coiled rope. We lived in a place where people were ready for things like this. I’d never stopped to look at the faces around town and wonder who had lost someone in the mines.
“Let’s go.”<
br />
I fell into line, behind the stretcher, the medic in front of me and Leo behind, the radio operator unspooling wire at the back. We walked in a stream of light created by our headlamps, which ran rough-edged over the ground.
“What’s it going to be like in there?” I whispered over my shoulder as we stepped off the edge of the roadbed onto a steep downhill scree of river rocks and pebbles.
“Dark.”
Any other question would be equally idiotic, but the next one asked itself without me deciding to speak. “Are we going to find them?”
“They’re in there somewhere.”
The ground slid away under me, and I stumbled, thrown off balance under all the extra weight. Leo hauled me upright by the straps as a cascade of small rocks bounced toward the other men, heel-stepping their way downhill ahead of me. Soon the ground leveled, the crunch of dry stones underfoot dulled, and then I felt water seep into my shoes.
“Good thing we had a dry winter,” Leo said.
Within a few steps we were back on dry ground. The hillside rose in front of us and in the stuttering light of crossing headlamps I could make out a crumbling pagoda of timbers set into the soil and rocks. A pine sapling sprouted from an upper corner. Hinges clung to the frame, but what must have been the door was now a scattering of broken boards to one side, nails protruding. EP OUT was spray-painted on one.
Alan stopped, and the men carrying the stretcher set it down. “Ready?” he said. He was looking at me.
I didn’t want to go in. I couldn’t stay out. I knew nothing about what we were doing, but I knew Kevin and Sarah, and for lack of anyone better, I knew they needed me. And I knew if I gave any hint of panic I’d be escorted straight back to the canopies we’d just left.
“Yes sir.”
He nodded, then he and the other men pulled on their masks. I’d been told that we would wear them as only a safety precaution, that air movement at the mine portal said good things about the quality of air inside, that this was an unusual case of a mine believed to be dry in an area where water was the norm, that it was labyrinthine but believed to be relatively safe, but it still took conscious effort for me to act calm when the seals closed against my face and I pulled air from the tank into my lungs.