Cavedweller (59 page)

“Don’t fight,” Mim insisted. “Lie back.”

“Tell me what to do.” Jean’s demand was spoken in the voice of a petulant, exhausted child.

“Help me.” Mim was growing more desperate as Jean’s shivering increased. Cissy tried to scrub at Jean’s back and look around at the same time. The slight grade they were resting on sloped down to meet another layer of rock. Just ahead there was that shine of some white reflective surface. Sand, she had seen it before. It looked like sand. Abruptly Cissy pulled free of Jean’s shivering body and grabbed the flashlight to shine the beam in the direction of the white glow.

“That’s sand!” She started pulling Jean with her before Mim realized what she was doing.

“Tell me what to do,” Jean said again. “Just tell me what to do. I can’t think. Just tell me.”

“Here, here.”

Cissy pulled Jean along the rock, dragging the wads of damp clothes with them. Mim was falling and weeping but climbing down with them, still holding on to Jean’s shoulder with one hand as if she could not bear to lose contact with her. Cissy pushed Jean ahead of her onto the sand surface, ignoring the girl’s squeals as the rough silt abraded her tender belly and thighs. Roughly Cissy shoved Mim to the other side so that they sandwiched Jean between them. Then she began again the coarse scrubbing motions with the filthy clothes. When Mim joined in and began to scrub Jean’s other side, the girl’s squeals became sobs.

“It’s okay, baby,” Mim crooned. “This is going to help. We’re going to warm you up. Oh, baby, we got to warm you up.”

Cissy scrubbed hard, rocking her whole body against Jean’s passive one. Gradually the exercise began to warm her as well, but it was fool’s heat, adding another layer of sweat to her skin. The damp would invite more chill. Deliberately she scooped sand over herself, adding another layer of insulation. Her body felt both tremendously heavy and gossamer-thin at the same time, as if her substance were evaporating with her efforts.

“Scrub,” she shouted, no longer sure she was talking to anyone but herself. “Rub harder. Come on.”

Mim scrubbed harder, briskly massaging Jean while Cissy left them to crawl over and drag back the packs. They had one remaining layer of dry clothing. The maps were wrapped in plastic covers. That was what they needed, paper to make another insulating layer. She used the map case and then some small plastic bags. She split those, spreading them out. That gave Jean one dry layer beneath the outer layer of wet clothing. It was a pity to pull apart the maps, but there was no way around it. They needed every bit of heat they could manage, every layer they could add.

With Jean in the shape she was, they did not have as many hours as they had hoped. They had to crawl and climb without stopping. If they stopped, they would die, all of them down here in the cold and dark. For a moment Cissy considered. Would she leave them if she had to do it to get out? Could she? If it came down to it, would she leave Jean in Mim’s embrace and crawl out on her own? I might, Cissy thought. If I have to, I might. I want to live. I want to get out of here alive.

“It’s going to be all right,” Mim whispered into Jean’s tousled hair. “You’re going to be fine. Just fine, baby.”

Cissy prodded Mim. “We got to get going.”

“She needs rest.” Mim sounded as if she wanted to cry.

“Listen to me.” Cissy put her lips up close to Mim’s cheek. She dug her fingers into Mim’s arm. “This is like being in a blizzard. It’s like taking a nap in a snowdrift. She can’t nap. We can’t lie down. We have to move and keep moving.”

“Please, Mim,” Jean whimpered. “Just let me warm up.”

“You won’t warm up.” Cissy felt as if her shoulders were tightening into iron posts. An iron core went up her spine from her tailbone to her brain. She was all ice and metal and cold determination. “You will die,” she said, and heard Delia’s accent in her own. Delia had talked like that when she had dragged them all the way across the country. She had pushed and prodded and forced Cissy to do what had seemed like sheer craziness. It had not mattered that Cissy hated her for it. It had not mattered that there had been no reason to believe they were going somewhere safe.

“She’s right,” Mim said, pulling at Jean’s body. “Oh, honey, she’s right.”

Mim pushed up onto her own knees and pulled Jean with her. Cissy reached over and grabbed Jean’s belt. “Get up. Come on and get up,” she shouted.

Weeping, Jean crawled up until she was kneeling beside Mim. “I hate you,” she said. She could have been speaking to either of them. It made Cissy feel light-headed to hear her say it. She smiled and her lips cracked as her mouth pulled wide.

“I hate you too,” Cissy said. “I hate this rock and this sand and God and Georgia and the ghost of goddamned Floyd Collins, but I am not going to die down here. And as long as I can make you crawl, neither are you.”

Cissy turned her body so that she could reach Jean more easily. She looped a loose piece of the rope she still had wrapped around her middle through the woman’s belt. Then she rolled around again and started crawling forward. She heard Mim moan and Jean cry out as the rope jerked and pulled her forward. It was harder still, crawling forward that way, dragging the reluctant and weeping woman behind her. Mim followed behind, sometimes cursing when she bumped her head against Jean.

Cissy paid no attention to the girls behind her except to kick at them when they stopped. She had a clear picture in her mind now. She knew exactly what she had to do, how far she had to crawl, how many times she would have to roll over and slide along on her back. This passage was lit up in her memory. It was the way out.

“Come on,” she called back over her shoulder to Jean and Mim. “This is it. It’s the way out, I know it.”

“You don’t know nothing.”

“Oh yes I do.” Cissy scraped a line of dirt off her neck where her collar was rubbing a raw spot. “I know this part. I know where we have to go. If you don’t come after me, I’ll leave you to rot down here.”

One of them sobbed and the other cursed. Cissy did not bother to see who did what or to speak. The rope tied to her belt loop pulled taut and then slackened. They were following. That was all that was important. If they kept moving, none of them had to die down here.

“I hate you,” one of them said in a hoarse, unrecognizable voice, and Cissy, still crawling forward, laughed out loud.

“Sure you do,” she said, “sure you do.” Light-headed and exhilarated, Cissy kept giggling to herself as she crawled stubbornly upward. The color of the sandy loam beneath her was buttermilk. The shale above was as dusty as a raven’s wing. Her pulse was pounding a steady cardinal, her breath was sky blue. Randall was singing somewhere behind her right shoulder, “born on the corner of Calvary and Nazareth, but I an’t gonna lay me down and die.” No Daddy, Cissy promised. If Delia could drag me so far, I can damn sure pull these bitches up out of a hole in the ground.

When they finally found the Day-Glo paint splashes three hours later, Cissy was shaking with exhaustion, but her head was clear and her thoughts as smooth as ball bearings on a greased surface. Venice Beach, she thought, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, UCLA California, and all those places I don’t even remember anymore. I can go there if I want.

“Daddy,” Cissy whispered when the morning sunlight fell on her face. “Daddy, I’m going to go back. I’m not going to die here. I’m going to find out what I can do.”

“Oh God,” Mim sobbed behind her. Her face was bruised and streaked with mud. She climbed up into the light on her hands and knees. “That’s the last time, the last time I ever do that in this life.”

“Oh, you don’t know what you’ll do,” Cissy told her. She was stumbling with exhaustion but full of happy exhilaration. “We don’t none of us know what we might do.”

Cissy looked back down past Jean’s sodden, mud-encrusted body. The gaping mouth of Paula’s Lost was half obscured by a sweeping hang of kudzu vines. “I don’t think I can map the passage,” she said. “We found it, but I don’t think I could show anybody the way. An’t that a hoot!”

D
elia sat in the coffee shop waiting for Emmet Tyler. There was a new waitress, a long-faced woman wearing a poorly styled wig. Delia kept looking at the wig, the way it fell around the woman’s face and the constant small motions she kept making to adjust it. I could fix that, Delia thought, and realized she had been comparing it to Amy Tyler’s wig, the one she had styled so long ago.

“God,” she said softly. She had drunk too much coffee. She didn’t think she could stand another cup.

“Did you hear anything from Emmet?” Cissy slid into the booth across from Delia. The scrapes on her face looked pink and raw, the knuckles of her right hand were bandaged, but her eyes were bright and clear.

“He an’t been in yet,” Delia said.

Cissy nodded. “Jean’s still at her mother’s place. Mim says she’s going to be fine, but she’s still pretty out of it. Says she plans to sleep the rest of this semester.”

Delia’s face collapsed. “Lord, Cissy, I could have lost you. You could have died down there.”

“Yeah.” Cissy smiled. “I know, but I didn’t, and I think that’s the whole point.”

Delia struggled to compose herself. Her fingers twisted together. The muscles in her neck corded as she swallowed and shook her head. “It’s nice to see you smile,” she managed to say.

“Well, we did something nobody else has done, what we wanted to do in the first place. We found our way from Little Mouth to Paula’s Lost. Only we didn’t map it and we can’t show it to anybody. Probably no one will believe it, and Jean and Mim swear they won’t go back, so I might not ever get to map it at all.”

“Is it that important?”

“It’s ironic,” Cissy said. “It’s like God’s joke.” She looked back at the café door. “Emmet was going to come here, right?”

“If he could get everything done. If he’s not here in the next half hour, we should go over to the courthouse.” Delia pushed the coffee cup away. “Lord, I almost lost you. And Dede shot Nolan, and Amanda’s drinking, and I just don’t know.” Her voice quavered.

“I’ve tried too hard to be a good mother. I’ve stayed sober, I’ve taken care of you, but I’ve done something wrong. None of you seem to know who you are or how much I love you.”

Cissy put her hands down flat on the table surface. “No,” she said. “None of us know who
you
are. Or I don’t, anyway. I don’t really know you at all. You always hold everything back. Clint told me more about you than you ever did, and when we were out at Granddaddy Byrd’s place, Dede showed me the pictures of your family. You never told me a thing about them.”

“I told you they died. Granddaddy Byrd raised me.”

“That’s nothing. That’s less that nothing. How did they die? When? What happened? You had a mama, a daddy. You had brothers. I saw them in the pictures. You never talked about them. You carry around this big silence, even when you go on about being so frank and all.”

Delia looked around the coffee shop. There were a couple of people at the counter, the waitress with the bad wig in the back, and one man in another booth. God help me, Delia thought. She felt as if her backbone were slowly twisting and pulling free from her hips.

“I want a cigarette,” Delia said.

Cissy was startled.

“I want a cigarette so bad I could eat my own tongue.” Delia turned around in the booth and waved at the waitress. “Ma’am, excuse me. You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?” Delia pushed her hair back. “I feel like I am about to die if I don’t get one.”

The waitress frowned, then gave a rueful smile and walked toward them. From a pocket under her apron she produced a pack of Kool Lights. “I know what you mean,” she said in a slow drawl. “They ever make this diner a no-smoking place, I’m gone that day.” She extended the pack to Delia, shook out one, and pulled another out for herself. From the same pocket she brought out a lighter and lit first Delia’s cigarette and then her own. She looked at Delia’s shaking hands and Cissy’s expression of dismay, and smiled gently.

“Hell, an’t it? Us being addicts and all?” The waitress put the pack and lighter away, then pointed at the cup. “How about something else?”

“I think something sinful.” Delia waved the cigarette. “To go with this. Why don’t you make me a malt?”

“Double chocolate or vanilla, or I think we got coffee ice cream back there.” The woman pushed self-consciously at her wig.

“Coffee, no. Chocolate would be good. Chocolate would be great.” Delia took a long, happy drag on the cigarette. All this time and she didn’t even feel the urge to cough. Hell, she thought, it’s the worst drug in the world. She turned around in her seat to call to the waitress again. “Hey,” she said. “You know the Bonnet? Down the way? The beauty parlor?”

“Yeah, the one with the spider plants?”

“I run it. You come in sometime. I know a style would look really good on you.”

The woman nodded. “Why, thank you. I’ll do that.”

“She needs some help,” Cissy said sharply as the waitress disappeared into the kitchen.

“We all do,” Delia said. “We all do.” She took another drag and put the cigarette out in the saucer of the coffee cup. Then she looked directly into Cissy’s face.

“All right. There’s something I want to ask you. How many people you tell about that eye?”

Cissy jerked back. Her face flooded color and her mouth fell open.

“Not many, huh?” Delia shook her head. “Most people don’t even know about it, do they? You don’t bring it up in casual conversation, do you? Say, ‘Hey, my daddy nearly killed me ’cause he was doing drugs and didn’t care that he had me and my mama with him in his car’?” Her face was stern. “Do you explain how much you loved him anyway? And how it don’t bother you at all that you can’t get a driver’s license?”

“Why are you doing this?” Cissy looked as if she wanted to cry but was not going to give Delia the satisfaction.