Blind Descent-pigeion 6 (12 page)

  This was answered by silence, and Anna wished she could see their faces. She pictured anger and resentment on Sondra, maybe touched with that absolute disgust she'd noted earlier. Peter McCarty was harder. Would he look hurt? Reproachful? Arrogant or vain?

  "And maybe I wasn't talking about Frieda," Sondra went on when the silence began to lose its power.

  McCarty sighed, a theatrical gust that Anna could hear down in her rabbit hole. "You can always leave," he said.

  "Right." Sondra laughed without joy. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? What? You expect me to go back to being a secretary? Fetching coffee for editors, old fat white men who have less talent in their whole bodies than I've got in my little toe?"

  "If you ever got anybody coffee-which I doubt-I suspect they had the good sense not to drink it," Peter snapped. There was anger in his words this time; his pose of world-weary patience was slipping. Sondra must have scented weakness. When she spoke again, she redoubled her attack.

  "I'll leave all right. When I'm ready. Maybe sooner than you think. All I need is one good story. When I go I'll take everything but your toothbrush and your little black book. If you lift a finger to stop me, I'll see your license is jerked, doctor."

  "I wouldn't push your luck if I were you." The trite comeback was so laden with ice and threat that Sondra fell quiet.

  Anna decided this was not a good time to pop out of a hole in the floor and yell "surprise." Moving as quietly as possible, she squirmed backward, filling the cuffs of her trousers with dirt until, hind parts foremost, she regained her little patch of land on the inside of the crawl way.

  "What's it like?" Curt had arrived. He sat in inky darkness, his long legs and heavily booted feet sprawled over their tiny room.

  "Squishy," Anna said succinctly. "Could you not breathe for a bit? I think there's only enough air for me."

  "No problem."

  He was quiet while Anna clambered over his knees and settled herself on a rock bracketed by his boots.

  "Let me go through first," she said. "The crawl space is way too small for you. You're going to get wedged. I don't want to be stuck behind you."

  "Will you bring me sandwiches?" he asked. He seemed utterly imperturbable, his voice light and laconic for so bulky a man.

  "Nope. Once I'm out of here I'm never going to let anything between me and the sun again. I'll buy a convertible, sleep out of doors."

  "I won't get wedged," Curt said. "My father was a rodent. My mother says a rat, but after further research I'm inclined to believe he was a common field mouse. I inherited his bones, mouse bones. Mine can fold in on each other allowing me to pass through apertures too small for mortal men. Once, on a dare, I crawled through the pop-top hole in a Coors can."

  "Hah."

  Half a beat of silence followed, then he added this note of verisimilitude: "I did have to strip down to my shorts to do it."

  Darkness reclaimed them, and that total absence of sound that is peculiar to caves. Not a whisper of air, not a sound of the movement of grasses, birdsong, running water, the stars spinning in their orbits. Anna took it as long as she could. To break the silence before it solidified, she asked, "What brought you to Lechuguilla?"

  "You're not of the Minnesota connection? I'm surprised Frieda thinks so highly of you. Where are you from?"

  "Originally, California."

  A groan.

  "Northern California."

  "That's okay then. Not Minnesota, but you get snow, right? I used to teach at the University of Minnesota. I got my Ph.D. there. That's how I hooked up with Peter and Sondra. Met him at a grotto meeting. He married her. Caving is a small world. Especially in Minnesota, land of ten thousand lakes. If there are any caves there, we call 'em aquifers."

  "Zeddie?" Anna asked.

  "Doubly connected. Frieda and her sister were pals. And she was an undergraduate. She had me for Leisure 101."

  "How did she do?" Anna asked for lack of anything better to say.

  "She was a vacant-eyed little snipe," Curt said as if this fact were obvious. "All students are vacant-eyed little snipes."

  Anna couldn't tell if he was joking or not. "Was Brent a student of yours? Adult ed," she added, realizing Roxbury was probably ten years Curt's senior.

  "Are you suggesting Brent is a vacant-eyed little snipe?" Curt asked innocently.

  Anna fumbled around for a minute, grateful for once for the darkness. Curt relented. "No. Brent's an outsider. Either Zeddie or Frieda asked him on. Or maybe he was tagged on by George Laymon. We needed another surveyor. I've worked with worse."

  From Schatz, Anna gathered this was high praise indeed.

  "Frieda's parents lived in Anoka," Anna remembered.

  "She used to be a patient of McCarty's," Curt said. "Or maybe it was her mother. I can't remember. I met her on an expedition in Mexico."

  "Peter is a GP?" Anna asked.

  "Gynecologist."

  "Jesus. Why is that funny?"

  Curt said, "If you're going to talk about stirrups and things, I'm going to leave the room. I'm very shallow. It's one of the things I like most about myself."

  "Turtling!" was shouted down the insulating passage behind them. They buckled on their hard hats, dragged Frieda over three more spines, set the Stokes on the floor, then pushed it through the crawl space to the waiting hands of the McCartys.

  One more inching of their sixteen-bodied worm, and Frieda was delivered from the cramped passage.

  The tunnel opened into a low-ceilinged room studded with formations and ending in a lip ten or twelve feet across and a couple of feet deep. A yard below was a second step of like dimensions, then a ninety-foot drop into a pit. The opening where they emerged marked the pit's halfway point. It continued upward, smooth as poured cement, for another forty feet. On the far side, going out of the top, was a black hole, shaped like a keyhole, about nine feet high, wide at the bottom then narrowing in to a wasp-waist of rock to open again in a slit no more than a foot and a half wide and half again that long.

  The pit, Anna remembered, was dubbed the Cocktail Lounge. At one time it had been partially filled with water. Formations shaped like giant golf tees-or cocktail tables, if one hailed from New York City-had formed in the bottom. There were seven in all, made of stone coming out of solution as it dripped from above over the millennia. Beneath the water, it had built up in slender columns. When it reached the surface, the stone spread out in ever-widening circles, floating like petrified lily pads on the lake. At some point the water had drained away or dried up and left only the pit and the nine-foot-high tables looking as if they were made of alabaster and inlaid with gold. Every square inch of the formations was covered in decorations. Small puff excrescences called popcorn studded the columns. Tiny stalactites dripped by the thousands from the undersides of the tabletops. Layer after layer of stone had formed with such delicacy and infinite variety that the formations presented larger-than-life sculptures by a mad, genius god fascinated with rococo baroque.

  They made Anna nervous. They were so beautiful, a testament to the sanctity of the deep caverns; she knew she was doomed to stumble over her bootlaces and take them all down like a row of priceless dominoes. Infamy would dog her to the grave and beyond as it would the man who had smashed Michelangelo's Pieta.

  Schatz, Dillard, Tillman, and Roxbury were rigging the descent. The others rested and kept out of the way. Anna edged over to where Frieda lay in the Stokes.

  "I've got to sit up," Frieda said. Anna understood. Too long on one's back was disorienting. She left Frieda and returned with McCarty's permission to let her sit as long as she had help, wasn't left alone, and the cervical collar remained in place.

  "God, that feels good," Frieda said as she gently worked her arms and shoulders. "Have you ever had a tooth crowned? Lain in the dentist's chair till you felt you were going to La La Land or bite the next finger that came into your mouth?" Anna nodded. "Like that."

  She drank from the water bottle secured in the Stokes near her hand. "Are we alone?" she asked.

  Anna looked over her shoulder. They were on the end of the ledge. The others seemed occupied; no one listened. "As alone as we'll ever be down here," she said sourly.

  "Good. I'm tired of being a good sport, a real trooper. This sucks. I hate it. I hate everybody and everything, and I especially hate this blasted cave and sincerely hope all caves the world over fill with bat shit. God," she said with a deep-seated sigh. "God, but I needed that. Now I can be cheerful and grateful and optimistic for another hour or so."

  Anna and Frieda were in the midst of a repast consisting of Beanie Wienies, granola bars, and cold Chef Boyardee ravioli; treats Anna packed in, unable to face a diet of MREs, government-issue meals ready to eat.

  A caver Anna'd seen but not spoken to invaded their picnic. Irritation, always close to the surface in an enclosed world, prickled under her skin. This was the guy who had badgered Frieda on the haul out of Tinker's. Despite the confined space, he managed a swagger. Munk, Kelly Munk. Anna fished his name out of the fog of conversational fragments she'd swum through during the past eight hours.

  Munk was young but not young enough to be excused, early thirties. Muscles bulged from hours at the gym. Flat, tiny ears were stuck on a square head. Muscle ridged the points of his jaws. Anna recognized the type. The only description the Hodags would approve of was egomaniac. Every EMT class had one; the world was a TV show, and he was the star.

  "Since we've got a minute, I thought I'd check your packaging," he said. "You're putting a lot of strain on this group. What do you weigh? One fifty? One sixty?"

  Frieda's mouth crumpled at the corners. Confidence and courage leached away.

  Munk reached to rearrange the patient's catheter tubing.

  "Don't." Anna grabbed a meaty wrist.

  Munk sat back on his heels, his eyes small, carplike. "She's not packaged properly. Holden may be an okay caver, but he's no EMT."

  A number of arguments came to mind, but Anna knew she'd be wasting her breath. "Go away," she said.

  "I think Frieda-"

  "Away. Far, far away."

  "Ahoy!" rang out from across the void.

  A dozen lamps switched on, beams crisscrossing like searchlights at a mall opening, to center on two figures waving from a narrow aperture on the opposite side and near the top of the chamber that opened into Razor Blade Run. The response from the cavers in the lounge was exuberant. Everyone, including Anna, shouted and hullabalooed like castaways sighting a ship. The energy of the rescue, the quest, the cause, made them all brothers, tied them together in a way they would miss when the littles of the workaday world pried them apart again.

  "Landline!" came the shout.

  "Good work," Holden called back. Energized by the sight of the others, the rigging team returned to work with redoubled vigor.

  Holden came over to where Anna and Frieda rested. An uncompromising look from the mild blue eyes relieved them of Munk's presence. "How're ya doing?" Holden asked as he straddled a rock and made himself at home.

  "I'm good," Frieda said firmly. "You guys are doing all the work. I get a free ride."

  "You'd do it for any one of us," he reminded her. "And will probably have to this year or next."

  Frieda didn't say anything, but it was clear she appreciated the thought.

  "Are you up to being famous for a minute? Now that they've brought the phone line down you can bet there's going to be a newspaper guy on the other end wanting to talk to the heroine."

  Frieda looked pained. "I hadn't thought of that," she admitted.

  "You don't have to do it. You don't even have to make any excuses. If it bothers you, we'll just make like static and hang up. That equipment is left over from the Korean War. Who's to say it's not going to break down?" He smiled what he probably thought was a wicked smile, but on his worn and weathered face it was so sweetly mischievous, Anna could have kissed him.

  Knowing she had an out gave Frieda courage. "I'll talk," she said. "My folks are probably glued to the television, sweating bullets. They're old. I was Mom's midlife crisis. If I don't call for three days they think I've been carried off by white slavers. I can imagine what they're going through with this mess. They'll feel better if they hear from me that I'm still alive."

  "Don't worry," Holden said. "It won't be just you yakking. As soon as a phone shows up, all of a sudden everybody's got somebody they've just got to talk to. We'll probably take a half-hour break for the doggone gabfest." He glanced at his watch. "Not so bad, I guess. By the time we get up that other side we'll have been truckin' for nearly seven hours, and Razor Blade Run is going to be a fun one to rig. Be good to have everybody fresh."

  The three of them looked across the pit to the keyhole in black on the ceiling. Razor Blade was rimed with a miniature forest in glittering aragonite crystals, a winter wonderland in snow white that stretched for nearly twenty yards. Some of the flowers were of a size and intricacy seldom seen before and never in such abundance. Aragonite bloomed in wild snowflake patterns, crystals growing from white root-like bulbs of the same substance. Lechuguilla's treasure was its formations and the wonder they created in the too-often jaded imagination of man.