Reprisal

by Mitchell Smith

  He slept under a quilt, too, lying still most of the night ... hardly moving, hardly turning at all, as if he were rehearsing for death. Charis had watched him sleeping, twice. He didn't snore, but moaned sometimes, dreaming like an old dog.

  Charis had watched him from the woods in daylight, seen him walking around his place, doing something to a canoe up on sawhorses--repairing that, and doing other chores in brown corduroy pants and a checked flannel shirt. Daytime, he looked like a tough old man.--But at night, when she'd twice come into the cabin and stood by the bedroom door, he was only old, and moaned in his sleep.

  Didn't smell like pee, though. Not yet.

  What in the world did he think while he was out there stacking the woodpile?--that if he turned suddenly, his wife might be standing behind him, smiling? His wife alive again, and as young as when he'd fallen in love with her?

  Old men's dreams. Sad zombie dreams they must be, trying to magic back moments out of some hour years before--remembering them so well, so perfectly, so much more clearly than yesterday's trip to the grocery. ... If there was a God, those memories wouldn't interest him at all. God would have seen all that, could go back and look again, anytime he wanted--trundle back down the railroad tracks of time. But people who thought he'd interfere with anything were kidding themselves. Strictly a spectator. Poor people down here were only TV for the angels--tragedy, comedy, porno, and farce. ...

  Charis drove on Peabody Lane, past an auto junkyard and a cafe, a diner that looked like something out of an old movie ... shiny aluminum. The diner was closed. Peabody Lane ran right into Lake Drive, and Charis took a left there.

  The drive ran along the lake, past ancient dented trailers--parked on tiny lots by the water and never moved again--and a few cabins looking not much better. Chaumette was a tacky old lake now, however fabulous and beautiful it might have been back in 1950. Probably still was 1950 to the old man. Then, it must have seemed that 1950 was the way things would be forever. ...

  She stayed on the drive more than halfway around the lake, then slowed and turned right down an overgrown access lane cut through the woods. She pulled out of sight from the road into a sandy space where a cabin's basement had been dug and concreted years before. ... The project abandoned after that to encroaching tangles of berry bushes, birch seedlings, and the lakeside's weedy pines.

  Charis turned off the VW'S engine and got out of the car. There were two condoms in the pine needles beneath a tree. They lay gray, wrinkled, and collapsed, the only things new since she'd been in the clearing three weeks before, and twice before that.

  Charis leaned against the tree's rough bark. She could see only a dawn-lit narrow reach of lake through its branches. No one was out on the water this early, fishing or boating. ... She stood leaning there and closed her eyes.

  The morning sun soon would rise enough for its light to touch her. Then she had the whole day to wait through. But since she'd been a little girl, she had found waiting a pleasure, relaxing, corridors of time as long and narrow as the view of Chaumette Lake, as still, empty, and restful.

  Joanna drove the narrow scrub-choked track up Whitestone Ridge--going slow through hill-shadowed dawn, the Volvo's headlight beams, barely useful as sunrise came, swinging slowly half around each rising turn. The Newcombs'

  farmhouse was a mile and more over the crest of the ridge; the car lights wouldn't be seen from there.

  In the weeks after Merle Budwing's death, Howard Newcomb and the Midstate Grotto had come to an agreement--far from satisfactory to the cavers. Their extraordinary Concave to be gated and shut to all further exploration, with the Midstate to have first go if and when it was opened again, with Newcomb's insurance company and lawyers satisfied.--The Grotto had supplied the gate, installed it, and kept two of the keys in case of a sudden change of mind, or an emergency rescue of some kids breaking the gate and going down and into trouble.

  Chris Leong, president, had one key. Joanna--rescue chairperson--held the other.

  Near the top of the ridge, she cut her lights, drove the last short stretch by increasing morning light ... then pulled the Volvo up amid a stand of pine at the track's dead end, and cut the engine. The last nighttime crickets were still singing while a dawn breeze drifted through the birches below, the pines and hemlocks along the ridge.

  There was no darkness left, up here.

  Joanna got out of the car, went around to open the trunk, and began to unload gear. She took the static Blue Water out first--two big two-hundred-and-fifty-foot coils--broke the keeper knots, and slowly fed each line down into a separate rope sack.

  It would have been convenient if they could have left a permanent rope rigged down, but that would have been too great a temptation to some break-in fools to try sliding down it, hand-over-hand. There was no man alive who could hand-over-hand down a forty-story rope, let alone climb hand-over-hand back up it. ... She'd have to rig the top two-fifty feet, then tie on the second rope, transfer to that to get to the bottom of the pit.

  She would certainly be out of the Midstate Grotto on her butt if they knew what she was doing. And be unacceptable after that to any cavers in the country, for breaking a gate agreement with a landowner, then going down into a major cave alone and scooping booty--discovering new passages, virgin chambers, on her own, taking all those pleasures for herself. That, and endangering the people who might have to come after her in trouble, find her and get her out of there, dead or alive.

  But there could be no rescue now, anyway, with no one knowing she was here. No rescue if she got caught in a squeeze, or trapped in a drowning pool, or broke her leg in a far passage miles under the ridge. No rescue. And afterward, no recovery of her body until the distant day some hiker or hunter, climbing high, found the car. ...

  Joanna lugged the two rope sacks up through the pine woods, a steep climb with the bags' heavy weight among close evergreens that held and dragged at her.

  Burdened, it was easy to trip on roots risen out of beds of pine and hemlock fronds, small fallen branches.

  One hundred yards ... a little more than one hundred yards up, she smelled the cave's breath. Cool, cooler than the summer's morning air. Cool and damp, the setting-concrete odor of limestone wet with water. It was a clean slow breeze, with no smell of either life or death to it, and grew stronger as she climbed.

  Soon she heard it, a soft hollow rushing sound as if the ridge were a beast of millions of tons, sleeping.

  Joanna came out from under the low, brushing ceiling of foliage, and into brighter morning. The gate, in a crease of the ridge's stone shoulder, was made of steel rebar welded into a tall, narrow grid, hinged and set into concrete edging both sides of a ragged entrance more than seven feet high, slightly less than three feet wide.

  The cave's cool breath came sighing through.

  Joanna set the rope sacks down. ... The gate's big padlock was a thick round of stainless steel. She unlocked it, hung it on a crossbar, and swung the heavy grid squealing open. Then she walked back down through the trees to the car ... put on her helmet, lashed the sleeping bag, selected and stowed gear into one equipment pack ... then slung the pack, the carabiners, and her harness over her shoulders. She closed the Volvo's trunk, and bent under the load, climbed back up to the cave's mouth, careful of her footing.

  In two trips, she hauled her gear inside, and down a rough passage slightly more than two feet wide ... piled the pack, sleeping bag, and rope sacks, then went back and closed and locked the gate behind her.

  Hefting the gear again, Joanna moved farther down the passage into deeper darkness and damp, the daylight only a faint glow behind her. ... She switched on her helmet lamp, and by that yellow cone of light, sorted out her webbing, then buckled on the sit harness, checked the adjustment--tight, but not too tight--and did the same for her chest harness. Then she buckled a one-inch-wide webbing strap up from her waist to connect them.

  After Budwing fell, Chris Leong had bolted two steel rigging anchors into the low stone ceil
ing of the passage, just short of the mud-slide chute. Joanna tugged the Blue Water's working end out of one rope sack, snapped back-to-back carabiners up into each anchor fitting, then tied into one set with a figure eight on a bight loop ... took the line over to the slightly lower anchor and tied another figure eight through the carabiners there. She examined the anchors' set by her helmet light, saw that the limestone they were bolted into was sound-not flaking, not cracked--then checked her rigging knots again, dressed and set them hard.

  Joanna dug for the Blue Water's running end, tied a looped knot there to keep from rappelling off it into the pit--then began the routine of attaching her gear and herself to the rope. She snapped the web-tape runners of her pack and rope sacks to her harness loops with small bent-gate Petzl carabiners, then clipped her rack descender to the steel link at the front of her sit harness, and threaded the Blue Water back and forth through the rack's small bars.

  She tested her harness buckles, snapped the safety shunt's runner to her waist link, and clipped the shunt onto the rope, for backup braking in case the rack failed. ... Then she double-checked everything she'd done, looked along the passage's wet mud floor for anything she might have dropped, anything forgotten, overlooked.

  When she was sure, Joanna backed slowly away from her anchors, feeding out rope through the rack, keeping tension on it ... gripping the shunt with her left hand to let the rope run free. She backed down until the heels of her boots rested just at the edge of the irregular black mouth of the chute.

  Then she stepped back and down--and instantly began to slide fast on slick mud

  ... kept her feet straddled wide as she skidded backward at a steeper and steeper slant into darkness. She clamped the rack's bars in her right hand to slow herself, half sliding, half dangling from the angled rope ... and looked up, trying to find the carabiner hanging from the chute roof. They'd rigged it suspended from a web-tape runner bolted to the chute ceiling, to pass the ropes through ... run them high at the pit's stone lip, out of the mud.

  Joanna caught a gleaming in her helmet's light, saw it was the carabiner hanging above her and to the left, and clamped the rack's bars to stop. She reached up with a loop of the rope in her left hand, unscrewed the carabiner's gate with thumb and forefinger, snapped the Blue Water in, and screwed the gate shut.--That was just done, and the shunt gripped again, when the pack and rope sacks, trailing on their tape runners, slid suddenly downslope past her, toppled over the rock's edge and into the pit.

  Their weight yanked at her, and Joanna slipped and fell hard, skidded down the mud slope on her belly, and was over the lip and falling into blackness, emptiness.

  She felt fear flash through her, bright and freezing cold. The rack. Hold tight ... hold tight.

  And she gripped it, gripped it with all the strength in her right hand, squeezing the rack bars together so the rope hummed, then whined running through them. She was too frightened to let go of the safety shunt, let its cam engage to halt her.

  She hung frozen instead, gripping the rack with all her strength so the rope, as friction took hold, gradually ... gradually ran through more slowly, until she was hardly falling, until she was only drifting down into darkness forty stories deep ... her pack dangling beneath her with the rope sacks, the Blue Water line feeding out of the first one.

  Embarrassed, grateful to be alone and have no one know how she'd panicked--gripping her rack in terror, instead of simply releasing the shunt-Joanna sailed down, sailed down the murmuring rope, its thin, sheathed nylon cording strong enough to hold anything but a fool.

  She imagined Merle Budwing's ghost calling to her from below. A ghost eternally in darkness, coolness, calling others down to him at the bottom of the pit. It would make a poem. ...

  Now, after those moments of fear, the reality of Frank's dying came sharply, freshly to her. She'd thought of her loss, of his leaving her. She'd thought of Frank's death--but not his dying. She hadn't considered the moments of drowning, his exhaustion and agony.

  Descending through an immense stone cathedral, hundreds of empty feet across, more hundreds of feet deep--its upper air lit after all, now that her eyes were accustomed, by two dim slender beams of light from minor cracks in the great dome of its ceiling--Joanna began to cry, and realized it was only the second time she had wept since Frank had died, as if she'd been waiting for this more proper place for tears. The cave, like the ocean, revealing so clearly how small, how minor they were, and in what a temporary way Frank had lived--and she lived still, and hung now on her little thread, a tiny, thinking spider with a poem in its head.

  Joanna took a breath and stopped crying. She blew her nose on her coverall sleeve, eased the bars of her rack and fell a little faster, so the Blue Water's sound rose in pitch as it payed through the friction. Above her as she sank, the rope's thin strand ran up and out of her helmet's light into distance and vaulted uncertain shadow. Beneath her was a gulf of deeper, then perfect dark.

  Joanna stood, her helmet lamp switched off, on heaped shifting slabs of fallen stone. She'd tied her second length of line on at two hundred and thirty feet ... then attached herself to the new rope below the joining knot, to rappel down the last two hundred-plus feet to the pit's floor.

  She'd turned off her helmet lamp to enjoy the dark, to stand in this great vault of darkness deep within the world ... alone except for Merle Budwing's ghost. He'd struck this heap of spoil after accelerating second by second in his fall, breathless, out of shout, not knowing when he'd strike--or whether he'd strike at all, perhaps only fall and fall forever, fall endless miles in pitch darkness toward the center of the earth.

  For him, the white smacking flash of impact must have been a fraction of an instant of relief.

  Joanna looked up, searched for those two beams of light in the dome's great height, and saw, high and higher, almost out of sight, their hair-thin traces that by contrast made the cavern's darkness darker, as if it were flooded by a river of blackness flowing in, and bringing silence with it.

  She lit her helmet lamp, and by that small bright cone of light fed the slack running end of the second Blue Water length into a rope bag, then weighted that with a heavy chunk of rock. Above the rope bag and its stone, the rest of the line rose up into cool damp dark air, up forty stories to the mud chute, the passage, and the gate. The rope, hanging slender as her finger, and moving slightly in the cave's cool breezes, was her only way up, her only way out.

  She took her chest harness off and left it with the rack and shunt by the rope sacks, along with her sling of carabiners. Then she dug in the equipment pack and took out two nylon tape runners and the sixty-foot braid of Pigeon Mountain climbing rope--dynamic rope, with stretch and give to it to cushion a fall. She hunted through the pack again, found the folded plastic survival bag, took off her helmet and tucked the bag into it, then put the helmet back on and checked her chin strap.

  It was odd to be alone in the pit, in darkness, alone in the tangled miles of the cave. Odd to be without the company of other cavers, their noise and occasional grunts of effort working passages in climbs and crawls, or lugging gear. Without their harsh joking.

  Strange to be alone, and a relief. As if being beneath the earth in pitch darkness, coolness, silence, being here and all alone, were the truth of the human condition--and everything brightly lit, crowded, noisy and warm, were only a lie waiting to be exposed. Exposed by drowning and death. Exposed by loneliness and loss. The cave, like the bottom of the sea, presented the fact.

  Joanna imagined herself as Merle Budwing was, and Frank. In stillness, silence, and the dark. The difference being that she still knew of death-and the dead did not.

  She shouldered the pack and rope, took six carabiners from her sling and snapped them to her waist harness, and walked away from the hanging line ...

  trudging, sliding down the long, unstable hundred-yard ridge of broken fallen stone. An insect crawling along the rough dark carpet of an enormous room. ...

  It took her half an
hour to get off the ridge of fallen rock and onto the pit's stone floor--scored and ravined yards deep by ancient rushing waters, scattered with the rubble the currents had left behind them, boulders, gravel, megaliths larger than houses. The vaulting space around, above her, seemed to sing in Joanna's ears, then shrink to only the reality of her helmet's cone of light--a yard or two across, a yard or two distant as she traveled.

  If she mistook a narrow trench in the pit's floor for a shadow in her light's beam, if she misstepped and broke her ankle, broke her leg, she could still self-rescue--crawl back to her distant rope in agony, rig her ascending gear, and struggle up, her bad leg dangling. It would take hours, it would be difficult, but she could do it, weeping, screaming if necessary.

  But if she slipped and fell here and broke her pelvis, or broke her back, then there would be no getting up the rope, even if she could drag herself over the long ridge of rubble to it. ... Then, she would lie licking damp stone for any moisture, and huddle dreaming, shivering, hallucinating as her lamp batteries failed, backup lights were exhausted, her rations were eaten ... and she died of darkness and thirst, before she could starve to death.

  Someday, after her car was found, cavers would come sailing slowly down through shadow for her body. They'd be very angry with her. ...

  Two hours later, Joanna had crossed the pit's floor, climbed a steep fifty-foot rise of rubble breakdown to its north wall, and stopped to rest a few minutes before climbing the forty feet of vertical limestone to the first passage entrance.

  It was a sheer wall of fractured soft stone-chocks and aids useless to wedge into cracks that crumbled and broke away on strain. It was hand-and-foot climbing. The Midstate Grotto had a policy of avoiding permanent bolted anchors where it could.

  "If you can't rock climb, don't cave-'cause where there're downs, there're going to be ups." One of Chris Leong's lectures. The Mad Chinaman--also known as Genghis Khan-Chris would be first down the rope, if they had to come for her body in a few months. He'd be absolutely furious. ...