by Nevada Barr
Unhurt, Brent Roxbury had already started the demoralizing process of fussing over Holden. Though necessary to a degree, Anna knew it increased the sense of helplessness. She was too tired and helpless herself to interfere.
As near as Peter could tell, Holden’s right ankle had been broken by the fall. As they shared their news with him, something else broke as well. Cracks appeared in his composure when he asked after Curt and Zeddie. They had been stationed along the Pigtail between Oscar and Holden. No one had seen them since the rockslide. The cracks widened, weakening the bones of Holden’s face when Oscar told him Frieda was dead. Maybe it was Anna’s knee that had crushed the life from her, but it was Holden’s anchor that had given way. Nothing that had happened to Holden himself seemed to interest him. He ignored what had to be the painful examination of his ankle, sucked dust into his lungs as if it were the purest of air while he hefted both the boulder and Frieda’s corpse onto his bony shoulders. An unsettling reflection of the feelings of those around him, despair marked his face like passing years. Anna recognized the temptation that had grabbed at her in the way he scrubbed imaginary cobwebs from his cheeks, the way his eyes lost focus as if he saw something beyond the rock walls. Holden was in shock. He wanted to give up, to lie down, pull disaster over his head like a dark blanket, and grieve. A broken ankle was a ticket to this lonely escape. Had Anna had an injury worth speaking of she might have used it to hide behind.
She thought she was too tired and shaken to care about anything, but she watched him grappling with his devil as if she’d bet the farm on the outcome. Oscar Iverson was there and he was functioning, but Holden Tillman was of the cave itself. In some unfathomable way, she felt should he give up, the cave would take him—take them all. Even should they be freed, when they returned to the world their souls would be left behind under tons of limestone.
“Goddamn, but I’m tired,” Anna said too loudly, blowing away the morbid fantasy.
A minute shift occurred in Holden’s dull stare. He was looking at Anna, his light on her face.
“Oscar,” he said in a reasonable facsimile of his old voice, “we’ve got to teach Anna the fine art of cowboy cursing.”
“Dad blast it,” Oscar said, and Anna heard the relief behind the words. He’d sensed Holden’s return as well.
“Gol dang it,” Holden said. “The power is in the diphthongs.”
Remembering her last great blasphemy before all hell broke loose, she gave it a try. “Shucks,” she said tentatively.
Everyone laughed. Brent’s laugh was shrill, an alarming whinny. There was an edge of desperation to it. Still, it was good.
“Darn tootin’,” Holden approved.
“We’re going to have to rig a litter for you.” McCarty jerked them abruptly back from the oasis of forgetfulness they’d forged.
The only litter they had was in the bottom of the rift, housing the remains of Frieda Dierkz. A clutch of icy fingers tweaked Anna’s insides, and she waited for Holden’s retreat back into the quietude of victimhood.
“My ankle’s not broken,” Holden declared. Wordlessly, Anna cheered his obstinacy. “Fix me up so I can get by.”
Anna and Oscar understood perfectly. McCarty was nudged aside. The two of them ransacked packs and first aid kits and built Holden a walking cast that kept his knee and ankle rigid. With duct tape and three of the lightweight, ladderlike aluminum rappelling devices they tied his foot and lower leg into a brace he could put his weight on. Dealing with the pain and awkwardness was up to him.
“Everybody okay?” It was Zeddie Dillard coming crab-like over breakdown from the direction of the goat track. Hailing her as Lazarus woman, they all but fell on her neck and wept. At least that was how Anna interpreted the calls of: “Where have you been?” Brent. “Now there’s a good-looking woman.” Oscar. And, “Is Curt with you?” Holden.
Of the six of them, she appeared to have weathered the incident the best. She’d suffered no physical injury. She’d not seen the litter fall, Frieda dead. Unlike Oscar, Holden, and Peter, she carried no burdens of responsibility for a crushing past or an unpromising future. Added to these was the blessing of youth and its attendant sense of immortality. Anna doubted it had occurred to this strong, determined young woman that something as paltry as the elemental forces of nature could snuff out her life.
Zeddie had tested the phone line, she told them. It was dead, probably sheared during the avalanche. Curt was unhurt, she reported. After the fall, she had seen Brent attending to Holden, and she and Schatz had passed the lines where Peter and Oscar descended to the Stokes. Since matters were being handled on the fall end, they had gone back to the beginning of the Pigtail to check on the others. Curt stayed back with four of the rescuers from outside who had been trapped.
“I thought it best we not all come thundering up here till we knew how things stood.” That said, Zeddie waited expectantly.
Truth was, nobody knew how things stood. Holden rose to the occasion, drawing the invisible albatross of leadership back around his neck. “You did just right,” he assured her.
“Did anybody . . .” Zeddie’s question petered out as she nodded at the pile of earth beneath and behind them.
That they squatted on the burial ground of the perhaps undead had not occurred to Anna, and she shivered uncontrollably. To have her one hundred fifteen pounds instrumental in the death of another of her fellows was insupportable.
“No,” Holden said firmly. “The others made it to the Distributor Cap before this happened. If anybody went up there after that, they had to sneak by. Everybody was out.”
Anna released breath she’d not known she was holding and laughed—a rush of air without sound—at the image that had held her in thrall; grasping hands thrust through the soil from a movie. Probably Stephen King.
“Frieda?” Zeddie said.
“Didn’t make it.”
Anna watched the woman’s face as the simple words sank in and thought she saw genuine sadness through the grime. In a spill of light, she caught sight of Roxbury at the same instant. He had already heard the news, yet sorrow and something else—a gestalt of expressions suggesting a painful and very personal loss—crumpled his face a second time.
“What happened?” Zeddie asked, and Anna drew breath to confess.
“She was killed in the fall.” Holden forestalled her. “After the anchor gave way and brought down the mountain there was nothing anyone could do. Anna was lucky not to be killed too.”
The statement was more than an exoneration of Anna. It was an acceptance of the blame. He’d chosen the anchor that had carried Frieda and Anna to the bottom of the rift.
“I’m betting the anchor held, that the slide started above the boulder and knocked it loose,” Oscar said in an attempt to ease his friend. “The anchor was sound. Rocks from above must have dislodged it. There couldn’t have been any way to foresee that.”
Brent Roxbury interrupted with a strangled noise.
“If you’re having a heart attack, I’m not up for CPR,” Anna said unsympathetically.
For a second he searched for words or breath, then he said, “Listen.” They froze in a sudden tableau, expecting a reprise of the horrible grinding. Instead came a musical cadence of taps, clear and sharp and obviously man-made.
Again Brent whinnied.
More taps.
Anna laughed, and Oscar with her. They were saved.
“Well,” Holden said, a ghost of the twinkle flickering through. “Somebody answer the doggone door.”
Zeddie was the quickest to respond. She scuttled up the newly fallen scree to where the taps emanated from. In her haste she started another rock slide, a tiny one this time, but enough to remind them how inherently unstable the slope was. Deep in timeless and unweathered earth, jagged corners unsoftened by the influence of wind or water, breakdown was cemented in place with a dry mortar of silt that had filtered down fine as dust over the centuries. Without external forces to act upon it, this bedding wen
t untested through soundless, lightless years. Once the delicate fabric was disturbed, it flowed like sand through an hourglass, trickling from beneath, shifting rocks that had been held unmoving for eons.
Having unclipped a carabiner from a belt loop on her trousers, Zeddie rapped it smartly against a stone. No reply.
“I think it’s too light,” she said, meaning the aluminum alloy of the ’biner.
McCarty dug a hammer from his pack, possibly the kind used to tap on patients’ knees. “Try this,” he said, and tossed it. Fortunately Zeddie’s hand was sure even in the faint and shifting light, and she caught it. This deep within the earth nothing could afford to be casual. Greater threats than Hodags were ready to make mischief at every turn. Shadows waiting to swallow tools, holes to snap bones, passages like mazes to capture lost souls.
Hostile work environment, Anna thought, and no one to sue.
Using the hammer, Zeddie banged three times in quick succession. Three raps came back and the cavers sent up a ragged cheer that ended as spontaneously as it had begun.
“Does anybody know Morse code?” Oscar asked hopefully.
“SOS,” Zeddie offered. They all knew SOS.
“I think that’s been established,” Iverson said dryly.
Another flurry of taps were exchanged for the reassurance of both parties. Nothing of moment could be transmitted, but the message that they were not alone, not forgotten, that help was on the way was enough.
“How long do you think it will take them to get through?” Brent said, and Anna was grateful he’d saved her from being the first to ask.
Holden and Oscar looked at each other in mute conference. Holden shrugged. “I’d only be guessing,” Oscar said.
“Guess,” Anna demanded, unable to help herself.
“A day. Maybe two.”
Anna’s heart shriveled up till it felt the size of a wizened lemon. “Twenty-four-hour days or eight-hour days?”
“Could go either way,” he replied unhelpfully.
Holden took over. “We got nothing to dig with and the best we can do to help is get out of the way. They’re going to be pushing out on this slope, and it’ll slide again before they’re done. We’ve all put in close to a nineteen-hour day. Everybody’s shot. Till we’ve rested we’re just accidents waiting to happen. We’ll set up a base of operations back at the other end of this hole. We’ve got beaucoup water. Rapunzel goes down forever. This cave’s got enough air to be considered a wind tunnel in some parts of the world, and we’ve got food. Lechuguilla’s warm and dry. All we’ve got to do is get comfy and wait for the cavalry to arrive. My guess is old Oscar here is being conservative. We only need wiggle room, not the Holland Tunnel. We’ll be out of here in eight or ten hours. Let’s go spread the good word.”
Though he’d chosen to be brave, macho, noble, and all the things that Anna and, she was sure, the others had hoped he would be, Tillman remained a cautious man. Because of his ankle he tied himself between Oscar and Brent, the strongest of those in their truncated group. It could have been argued that McCarty was sturdier than Iverson, but he hadn’t recovered from the trauma of the avalanche or Frieda’s death—whatever demons stopped his voice and drained the blood from his lips.
Consumed by an all-encompassing fatigue, Anna was unable to take much interest in McCarty’s well-being. Body, mind, and spirit were exhausted. The ache in her arm and her fear of falling kept her awake. The lure of the lamp kept her moving forward. She’d come to believe there were no flat level places in all of the inner space of Lechuguilla. The “trail” they’d been calling the goat track was like the dotted line on a cartographer’s drawing; it existed only in their minds. Reality was a stretch of rock that could be navigated only by borrowing from the traveling techniques of spiders, monkeys, starfish, and weasels.
On the careful trek back, McCarty was in line behind Anna, taking up the last position. “Sondra?” he said with the startled intonation of a man remembering a package left behind in a taxicab. He had to say it a second time before the import penetrated Anna’s haze of self-absorption.
“Sondra?” she echoed stupidly, and ceased all movement to summon the energy required to process the idea. “Zeddie!” she hollered when the thought had percolated through the layers of dulled emotion.
“Yeah?” Zeddie called back. Anna could just see her, down on all fours like a muddy St. Bernard, fifteen or twenty feet ahead.
“Is Sondra back with Curt?”
A moment’s silence followed, then the almost inevitable response: “Wasn’t she with you?”
Anna swiveled her head to see if the message had reached the doctor. It was the only part of her anatomy she felt she could disturb without danger of dislodging her corpus from the rock face. With the poor light and the distance, she could scarcely read his reaction, but it looked as if as much guilt as worry. Maybe he realized how late in coming was this concern for his missing spouse. Anna studied him an instant longer, trying to see if relief mixed with concern on his face. If it did, she missed it.
“She told me she was going to rotate out,” Anna remembered.
Now the doctor did look relieved, and Anna mirrored the sentiment. Intrigue in addition to all else that had happened might have proved to be the proverbial straw.
Camp was luxurious by caving standards: there was a fairly flat spot for everyone to lie down on. At Holden’s insistence, food was eaten. Most were so tired they would have forgone the meal to avoid the effort of lifting the spoon from container to mouth. Understanding the need to fuel the body, Anna ate mechanically. The disappearance of Sondra was hashed and rehashed. The four cavers who had taken up the rear position on the Pigtail had spoken to her early on during the rigging but hadn’t seen her since the actual haul began. Anna dutifully repeated her hopeful tale of Sondra’s opting to rotate out. No one had seen her going ahead with the others, but such was the crush of cavers and the business of the traverse they might easily have missed her. She’d not told her husband of her plans. None but the four newcomers seemed to think that unusual. Anna wasn’t the only one who’d noted the relationship between Peter and Sondra was strained.
Consensus was that Sondra had gone out. Either that or she lay under the rock and dirt of the slide. Despite the slimness of this possibility, Anna knew Holden would have spent the night digging but for the fact that by the time Peter McCarty had mentioned she was missing it was too late, she’d have been long dead. Holden wasn’t one to risk the living for the dead no matter how good it might look on paper.
Chewing, swallowing, drinking warm water, it occurred to Anna that Peter might have waited on purpose. A rock slide would be a convenient end to an inconvenient marriage. Anna had no idea what power Sondra thought she had to jerk her husband’s medical license, but if it was true and half an hour’s malicious silence could remove the threat for all time . . .
Anna’s punch-drunk brain fumbled at the thought for a while, then let it go. Odds were against it. At any rate it would be unprovable.
Oscar and Holden did a commendable job with their pep talks. Oscar’s was filtered through fatigue and Holden’s a near-crippling sense of guilt, but they served their purpose. The team was given hope and cohesion. Lisa, the long-braided caver who had been trapped with the core group, was a practicing Buddhist. She said a prayer for Frieda that Anna was too tired to follow, but she appreciated the gesture.
One by one they made the creeping journey from their bivouac to the mouth of the Pigtail where there was a good “squatting rock” and they could perform their evening ablutions. Limited space precluded both a ladies’ room and a men’s, so an empty water bottle was set in the trail. If the bottle was upright, the loo was available, if on its side, ocupado.
Throughout the bustling and munching, the coming and going, Holden and Oscar sat huddled in conversation. If asked a direct question or detecting a need of a team member, they would break from their tête-à-tête, only to return to it the moment they were no longer wanted. They s
poke so quietly Anna couldn’t discern individual words. She didn’t have to. She knew as surely as if she sat with them that they were rigging and rerigging the traverse, mentally stalking around the anchor boulder, asking each other if they could have seen something that signaled instability, if they’d missed a tell-tale sign that might have saved Frieda’s life. Unless cause and effect were established, this was a conversation Holden Tillman was going to have with himself for many years to come.
Finally, tucked in close as sardines in a can, the cavers bedded down. Anna was sandwiched between Curt Schatz and Lisa. Where she would have expected a deepening of claustrophobia, she found comfort. Lamps were extinguished. Before the heavy night of the underground could oppress, Zeddie began to sing. Her rich alto reverberated from the stone and filled all the cracks and crevices with humanity, pushing back the unforgiving dark. A truth Anna had long suspected was ratified: we are one another’s angels. No unearthly sound could have been so glorious.
“Life is like a mountain railroad with an engineer that’s brave. We must make the run successful from the cradle to the grave,” soared through their miserable night, powered by notes of youth, tones of raw faith in the inherent goodness of existence. Old-time gospel had a healing power bloodless intellectual faith could not lay claim to.
Sleep came before the song ended, not in the pleasant drift Anna was accustomed to, but with the suddenness of a trapdoor falling shut. Deep and dreamless, a little death, it held her paralyzed for a time, then loosed her into the conscious world as rudely as it had snatched her from it.
In an instant she was hideously awake, clawing at the air above in a vain attempt to rip away the suffocating tonnage of bedrock. Her heart pounded and her breath came in staccato gasps. A light, she needed a light in order to breathe. Elbowing her companions, she dug into her pockets for the little Maglite she had rescued from her pack.