“And light the torches before you leave.”
“But . . .” I look to one of the torches and out of the corner of my eye I get a flash of bare skin, and underwear dropping onto a pile of clothes. I look away again. “I wish you won’t.”
“Wish all you want, Dad. It’s too late.”
I glance back and all I see is her head floating on top of the black-looking pool.
“This is wonderful. The temperature is perfect, probably a hundred and four, or five. And it’s not that deep. Look.” She rolls over and stands. The water comes up to the middle of her bare butt.
I look away again. “Okay! That’s fine. Sit back down, please.” She does. “I’ll light the torches and go get your mom.”
When I return I have Matt with us. I don’t like it but I couldn’t leave him by himself.
“This is wonderful,” Tanya says as she drops the towels and dips her hand into the water.
“It’s great, Mom. Get in.”
And then Tanya starts removing her clothes without a single thought of Matt standing there with his jaw hanging open. Knowing that there is no more point in arguing with her mother as there was with Becky, I place my hand on Matt’s arm to turn him around. He doesn’t respond. “Matt!” My voice gets his attention.
“Sorry,” he says but his eyes attempt to hold the vision of Tanya’s bra coming loose—she strips faster than Becky—before the motion of his body, with my assistance, forces his head around. “Sorry,” he says again.
I fully understand. Despite giving birth twice, Tanya has managed to hold on to her figure. Watching her get naked has always been one of my greatest pleasures, and often led to other great pleasures. I manage to force away most of those last thoughts in the presence of my daughter and this twenty year old kid. I don’t force away my eyes, however. God, she’s beautiful.
She slips into the water and moans with pleasure.
The pool is oval shaped. Eight or ten people could fit in it comfortably without overlapping on to each other’s personal space. It is not stagnant, but I can’t see where the water enters. There is a small stream—a gallon or two a minute—flowing away, disappearing somewhere in the rocks. If it’s going out it must be coming in. “Can you feel where the intake is?” I ask.
Becky pulls her hand from the water and points. “That area over there is real hot. I think that’s where it’s coming in.”
I walk around to the spot and stick my arm in up to my elbow. She’s right. It’s hot enough to be extremely uncomfortable. I find incoming water; not quite a jet but strong enough to be noticeable. “There has to be a cold source as well. Do you feel any cold areas?”
Their heads float here and there, an occasional bare shoulder or bare back surfacing out of the black pool, until Tanya says, “Here. It’s at my feet.”
“So,” I conclude, “there’s a hot spring and a cold spring feeding at the same time.”
“A natural hot tub,” Becky says. “Or a hot pool. A perfect balance. This is so cool.”
“Still, the air is too warm,” I say.
“What do you mean?” Tanya says.
“This isn’t the source of the heat that’s keeping this place warm. It’s almost like a sauna in here, and the main cavern is a good fifteen degrees warmer than it should be. And when we came in here did you feel the breeze? Hot air moving out.”
“Yes, come to think of it.”
“There’s an intake of warm air somewhere and it’s being pushed into the main cavern.” I grab Matt’s arm. “Let’s you and I do some exploring.”
“Okay,” he says, but I can see, I’d rather be in there with two naked girls, written all over his face. I’m quite happy to provide a diversion.
I pick up the lantern and we move around the pool and then up a rock slope. I can tell we’re going in the right direction by the increase in temperature. When we level out we are about thirty feet above the women, and roughly fifty feet away. There is certainly a breeze, and it is hot. I put my face to it and head for a spot that reflects back no light—an opening as I expect. It is just large enough for a man to crawl through, if he had a death wish. The breeze coming from that hole is like opening the door of a blast furnace.
“Do you feel that?” I ask.
“Wow!”
“Wow is right, Matt.”
“What did you find?” Tanya calls.
I look down toward the pool, the torches giving just enough light that I can see the two of them sitting next to each other, completely exposed from the waist up. Fortunately their backs are to me. It’s like seeing twin Tanyas, the only difference is their hair styles and Becky’s muscular shoulders. I’m amazed at how much Becky has grown up and how young looking Tanya has kept herself. I suddenly realize I’m staring, unabashed, when I catch Matt gawking. The difference between my staring and his gawking is the drool sliding from the corner of his mouth. I punch him with my elbow. “I think we’re sitting on a volcano or something,” I call back to Tanya. “There’s a natural furnace blowing in hot air.”
“Oh! Is it dangerous? Should we be worried?”
I sense a tad amount of fear in her question, common sense trying to maintain control. “Maybe in ten-thousand years,” I say, not really knowing, but certain enough that we’d be safe here for quite some time. “We’re heading back. Make yourselves decent.”
I hear a couple of giggles just before their skin disappears below the black surface, and all that is left visible are a couple of floating heads. The giggles feel good. It means they have put aside the stresses of the day to enjoy the moment. It means that they are not fighting. It also means something else. When Becky giggles, she is being a teenager. When Tanya giggles she’s being mischievous, rarity for her. The two giggling together, I can’t imagine.
We head back down.
Reba
I cannot believe what Mom is suggesting. The, “I don’t like the cut of the swim suit,” mother. The mother who grounded me because I switched blouses on the way to school after she forbid me to wear the one that revealed “too much cleavage.” She actually showed up in my high school to check up on me. The mother who grounded me again when she appeared at the beach party after the big meet in Galveston where I was wearing a t-shirt with no bra. The mother who made me return skirts because they were too short. This is the same mother who now says we should let the guys get into the hot pool with us?
She slides up the edge a bit and sits, her upper body out of the water.
“Naked?” I ask. I do the same and sit next to her. The contrast of hot water and relatively cool air feels good.
“We could make them wear their underwear.”
“I don’t want to see Dad even in his underwear.”
“I don’t think he looks so bad.”
“Mom!”
“What about Matt?”
That’s not a fair question. He may be mentally unstable, but he is good looking. For a while, in the beginning, I had a little bit of the hots for him. Seeing him in the buff wouldn’t be all that bad, but not in front of my parents. Gross! And I certainly don’t want him seeing me, and especially not Mom. Nude girls do funny things to guys, and he’s weird enough already.
“We’ll just all have to be adult about it,” she says. “It’s only fair. Their muscles need this just as much as ours do, but I don’t want to get out.”
Is that what being adult is? You can get naked in front of each other without it being a big deal? Dad says something, but I can’t make it out. Matt says, “Wow!” Then Dad’s voice again.
Mom calls to them. “What did you find?”
“I think we’re sitting on a volcano or something,” Dad says. “There’s a natural furnace blowing in hot air.”
“Oh! Is it dangerous? Should we be worried?”
“Maybe in ten-thousand years,” he says. “We’re heading back. Make yourselves decent.”
“Besides,” Mom says quietly, “it could be fun just watching their faces . . . and other parts.”
“Mom!” We both giggle and slip back into the water. I’ve been on the edge of reading her thoughts but have thrown up a block. The last thing I want to do is see what she’s thinking, especially right now. No telling what fantasy is floating around in there. She may be suddenly weird, but she’s in a good mood and we’re getting along. I decide I’m not going to do anything to end that, even if it means we all stand naked in a circle and stare at each other.
I shiver at the thought.
Zach
We half walk, half slide back down to the pool. The women . . . girls . . . one woman, one girl . . . whatever, have odd looks on their faces. Maybe it’s the flickering lantern light. I leave it at that. “There’s a steady blast of hot air coming in up there. I don’t think you could ask for better climate control. It probably stays this way all year round.”
I wait for a comment back. I only get a grin from Tanya, a blush—hard to tell in the light for sure—from Becky. “Is there something wrong?” I ask.
“No. We’re just wondering . . .” she glances at Becky, “if you’d like to join us?”
That’s what the giggling was about. “We can take our turn later.”
“Seriously, Zach. We don’t want to get out, and you guys deserve it just as much as we do.”
“We can wait.”
“Lighten up! There’s no one but us. We’ve all been through a lot together, and maybe a lot more yet to come. There’s more than enough room in here and it’s dark enough to be discrete.”
If it was just me, that’d be one thing, but I can imagine Matt’s suppressed grin without looking at him. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea,” I say. I glance at Matt. There is no grin. It appears the idea is making him nervous.
“Either start taking your clothes off or we’re going to stand up until you do, and I have a feeling you’d rather we don’t do that, Zach.”
I’m being blackmailed, and I’m sure that Tanya would follow through on it, too. I can tell by the look on Becky’s face that she’d rather not, but something tells me that she would stand by her mother. “You wouldn’t,” I say just to be sure. She leans forward in the water and starts to rise until suddenly all I can see is cleavage. “All right!” She sits back down.
“I don’t want to,” Matt says.
“We’re not going to look, Matt,” Tanya says. “This is nothing but four people enjoying the hot water. That’s it! Period!”
“I don’t know.”
“Give it up,” I say to him. “You’re not going to win this one.”
“We’re going to turn around,” Tanya says, “and then we’re going to count to fifty. If you’re not in this water by then, then I’m going to go over there and drag you in.”
His eyes dart between her and me, hoping another option magically appears.
“I’m not joking around, Matt. Get in now.” With that she turns around, and Becky follows. “One,” she starts. “Two.”
I don’t know what has come over her; why the sudden need for control over something this trivial. I consider fighting it for Matt’s sake, because to him it’s not trivial, but what would it do to him to have a naked woman rush at him and drag him fully clothed into the hot water? If he is as unstable as Becky says he is, this could drive him closer to the edge.
Her count reaches ten.
“It’ll be okay, Matt,” I whisper to him. “Leave your underwear on, or your jeans for that matter. There’s a fire and they’ll dry.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not that.” He looks at the back of Tanya’s head and then leans in closer to me. “I ... I don’t like water.”
“Oh. Kind of like my not liking heights.”
“Yeah.”
Becky is right on the money. This kid is a total mess. How in the hell did we get him to get in the creek when we ran out of the house? Maybe seeing his dad gunned down suppressed everything else. Tanya reaches twenty-five and I lay my hand on Matt’s arm and point him out of the cavern room. By the time she reaches fifty and I hear her angry voice echo through the caverns, we’re sitting in front of the fire.
Reba
“To hell with them!”
Mom may be pissed, but I’m relieved. I try not to show it.
“They can just go f . . . screw themselves!”
I try to sooth her. “It’s okay, Mom.” She lays back and closes her eyes, her body again halfway out of the water. It’s getting to feel a bit too hot so I stretch for a towel, wrap it around me and then sit with only my feet submerged. “Are you feeling all right, Mom?”
“I’m fine,” she says but the tone of her voice reveals otherwise.
I pull my knees up to my chest and rest my head. What’s next? How many times have I asked that question since running out of the house? Matt has gone down the mental road and Mom keeps trying to run off in the same direction. The only normal ones are Dad and me. At least I think we’re normal, if you remove the psychic crap. I’m over the edge in that arena so that makes Dad a bit more normal than me. That doesn’t sound right. One can’t be more than normal. Dad is a little less than normal, and I’m a lot more less than normal. What the hell is normal anyway? How would the normal person handle the situation we’re in?
Shit to hell what a mess.
Now Mom is remembering when she first dated Dad. I’m not reaching into her mind to get it. It’s just there like someone has suddenly turned on a TV in front of me. I’ve learned that I can block it, but the images are comforting. They’re like the stories Mom has told me many times about how she and Dad had met and dated. The fact that I showed up eight months after they said their vows fooled nobody, she told me when I asked her about it a few years back. “Not even you.” Two years after me came Christi. We were a happy little family until Dad decided to go find himself. That’s not how Mom tells it but that’s how I’ve figured it out. She makes it sound like the romantic pursuits of a writer or some such thing. He left his family in Dallas and went to Seattle. In a weaker moment one time Mom said it had something to do with the Millennium thing. People were all scared that the world would fall apart as the clocks rolled over to 2000.
The Y2K.
She tried explaining it but it really made no sense at all. Something about computers not being built with the codes for the year 2000. Airports would shut down, power plants would go off line and the country would go dark. The world would go dark, and then we would all revert back to the middle ages of war and looting and raping.
Dad denies that Y2K had anything to do with it. He was pursuing markets in the Northwest. He said that it was after he had exhausted all the possibilities in Seattle, and he was preparing to return to Dallas, that he got the assignment with Sans Sanssabre. That eventually got him and Mom being chased by sabre-toothed cats, and later me going off in search of the same cats.
Is that weird or what? Because Dad decided to go to Seattle in search of writing opportunities in 1999, and then later, in 2000, going to Montana, I’m sitting here with my feet dangling in a hot spring in the middle of a sabre-toothed cat den in 2008. Everything is linked by a long chain of events. What if Dad hadn’t taken the assignment? What if Mom hadn’t shown up at Sans Sanssabre? Would Dad now be dead or would he have run off with Aileen Bravelli? Would I have come to Montana? Would Matt’s Dad be alive?
Except for our grime encrusted clothes, we feel human again. Towels slung over our shoulders, we stand just at the edge of the torch light and look over our new digs. The lights are on but nobody’s home. Where are Matt and Dad? Mom spots them and points. They’re off the path that leads out to the waterfall and it appears they’re looking down at something. We can only see their top half. It’s the place where I startled the sleeping sabre-toothed cat.
“Let’s go see what’s they’re doing,” Mom says.
Just as we start up another body stands up between Matt and Dad. I recognize the body, the tight jeans and kaki shirt, and the floppy Aussie hat. This is the person we’ve been waiting for, who we should all b
e excited to see. Immediately, like the romantic memories that came to me while sitting on the edge of the hot spring, Mom’s thoughts again jump into my head, only this time they explode with seething anger. It is so sudden I stumble back against one of the stumps and have to sit down to keep from falling over backwards. I recover to my feet, thinking that she is going to race up there and create another scene. She doesn’t move, though. We stand for a long time looking at the three of them, their backs to us. Now Matt drops down out of sight and it’s just Dad and Sam standing next to each other, almost touching. Mom starts to move forward, both physically and mentally. No! Don’t!
Her head snaps around to me and I get the strangest look as though I just poked her with a needle. “What did you say?”
“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.” It was only my thoughts. They didn’t come out of my mouth. I must have transmitted them telepathically.
Holy shit to hell!
She backs away from me as though there are oozing pustules exploding off my face. “Who the hell are you becoming?” She backs away another step.
“I . . . I.” She turns and heads toward the guys and Sam. “I’m sorry,” I say, and make sure I definitely do say it. I follow it with another mental, shit to hell!
Mom is half way there—I haven’t moved—when Dad sees us. “Becky,” he yells. “There’s a first aid kit in one of those bags. Bring it up here.”
First aid kit? I dig through the bags until I find it, and then head up to them, my curiosity sharing time with my trying to figure out how I’m going to block my own thoughts from going out. I’m not only a freak at the carnival, I’m the lead billboard freak right next to the two-headed woman and the man who is half bear.
The four of them are looking down at a sabre-toothed cat. He is lying on his side. There are several blood encrusted gashes along his ribs. I hand the kit to Dad and say, “Oh, wow! That’s one of the cats that fought with the grizzly bear.”
“A bear attacked him?” Sam says.
“No. He attacked the bear who was already fighting with two younger cats. He and the others saved my life.”
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 70