Man Camp (16 page)

Suddenly, Beatrice’s voice calls up from downstairs, “I hope you’re not making a mess! Ruth just cleaned today.” She flicks on the light from below and hums as she climbs the stairs.

Martha and Cooper sit up. Martha straightens her clothes and checks her hair, feeling as if she’s back in junior high.

Beatrice arrives with a feather duster in hand. “Ruth always forgets to do these bookshelves,” she says, occupying herself with the task.

Cooper gives a resigned exhale.

Do something!
Martha thinks, and starts to count to three. She stops at one, too furious to go on. Abruptly standing up, she says good night and walks toward her room, at the opposite end of the hallway from Cooper’s. It occurs to her as she closes the door that Beatrice never retires until Martha is safely tucked away in the tiny guest bedroom.

Martha flops down on the bed, buries her face in the pillow, and groans. She picks up a book to distract herself, tries to read, and puts it down. A few minutes later, she picks it up again. A moth is trapped in the shade of her reading lamp, its wings thudding against the sides. She snaps her book shut, pulls the covers to her chin, and turns off the light. Out the window she sees the barn, tiny in the distance, and wonders if the cows are asleep. Then she wonders if the men have gone to bed, if she’s put on weight, if Beatrice has always been this interfering, and if, indeed, stars are totally unnecessary miracles. Her mind flits from subject to subject until it lands on what’s bothering her:
What has been distracting Cooper?
But the more she tries to focus on the problem, the blurrier it gets until, at last, sleep consumes her.

THE NEXT DAY, Cooper supervises the morning milking and then leaves for town, where he has an appointment at the local bank. He instructs the men to meet his farmhand Roy Snedegar at the south pasture after breakfast to clear the land, which has gone to seed. He promises to be back in time for lunch and to take them to the pistol range for some afternoon target practice.

The weather is beautiful and the men decide to walk to the field rather than drive, setting out along the dirt road leading from the farmhouse to the main road. They pass the fence they built, a field they planted, and a number of newly tuned-up farm vehicles. Aware that their time at Tuckington Farm is more than half over, they are feeling especially tolerant of one another, and no one even minds when Simon gives a mini-lecture on the benefits of crop rotation. Adam is whistling. With his dissertation neatly falling into place in his head, he’s ready for another day of work.

As they round the final bend leading to the south pasture, they see a sheriff’s car pull out of Tuckington Drive and onto the main road. An orange sign is tacked to the post.

“What’s that?” Bryce asks.

“Holy shit,” Adam says, reading the small print. “ ‘Upon breach of the condition of mortgage by nonpayment or non-performance of the condition stipulated in such mortgage . . . ’ My God, it’s a foreclosure notice. Cooper’s about to lose Tuckington Farm.” He skims the rest of the notice, reading certain words and phrases aloud: “ ‘Public taking.’ ‘Final determination.’ ‘Petition to vacate.’ ”

“I guess Mr. Perfect Alpha Male doesn’t have everything so under control after all,” Kurt says.

BACK AT THE FARMHOUSE, the women clear the breakfast dishes and put the finishing touches on Operation Damsels in Distress. Lucy tells Martha about the cave system where they plan to get “lost” later. “Tuckington Farm sits on what’s known as a karst area, essentially a foundation of water-soluble limestone,” she says, thinking more information will make Martha more enthusiastic about their impending adventure, though she knows enough not to mention that albino cave spiders inhabit them. “Let’s synchronize our watches.”

“I love your sense of daring, Lucy,” Beatrice says.

Getting away from you is worth a few hours in a clammy cave,
thinks Martha, accidentally banging her hip against the corner of the kitchen island and acquiring yet another bruise.

“Cooper once told me the saddest story about his favorite calf getting lost in there,” Lucy says, turning to Martha. “He was only eight years old, and he and his father searched all morning for the calf, following the sounds of its bawling. But it kept walking away from them and farther into the cave, until at some point, his dad decided that enough was enough and said, ‘Good luck, calf,’ and dragged Cooper out.”

“Then the
real
bawling began,” Beatrice takes over. “The boy was inconsolable!” She looks at the kitchen clock. “It’s exactly eleven.”

Lucy adjusts her watch. “Okay. So, we go in the main entrance, take a right at the far end of the first big chamber, walk in about fifty yards, and sit on the flat rock and wait,” she says, repeating their plan. “When the campers come back for lunch at noon, you act alarmed, tell them Martha and I have been missing for hours, and they come save us. Instant heroes.”

“Perfect.”

“And Cooper is our backup plan, in case anything goes wrong,” Lucy adds.

“Where is Cooper?” asks Martha, who overslept this morning and hasn’t seen him since their ill-fated make-out session the night before.

“If there is one thing you should know about me, I never intrude into my son’s personal life,” Beatrice replies, taking a dainty sip of coffee. “Sometimes his engagements in town last well into the night.” Her voice is thick with innuendo.

Martha reminds herself that “well into the night” in the Tuckington household probably means 8 P.M., and wills herself not to let Beatrice get to her.

“Cooper is supposed to be back by lunch,” Lucy assures her. “If for any reason the campers can’t find us, Cooper definitely will.”

“Let’s hope he does a better job with us than he did with his calf,” Martha says under her breath. “Now, shall we get this show on the road?”

“Before you two leave, we should discuss the party,” Beatrice says. “We’ve invited fifty neighbors and friends to come over on Friday and we haven’t even planned the menu!”

“How about starting with a huge salad,” suggests Martha, longing for the taste of bitter greens. She pictures a collage of arugula, avocados, and cherry tomatoes in an enormous wooden bowl.

“Not a bad idea,” Beatrice says, sounding surprised. “Jolene’s potato salad won first prize at the Neola County Fair last year. I bet she’d whip us up a batch. Cooper just loves her cooking.”

Potato salad is
not
salad,
thinks Martha, but says, “Sounds delish.”

“I was thinking about ribs as the entrée,” Beatrice says.

The phone rings and when Beatrice goes to answer it, Martha puts on her jean jacket and says, “Now, Luce. We’re leaving
now.
”

As they walk across the property to the cave entrance, at the bottom of the sinkhole, Martha tries to imagine the vast limestone underworld that Lucy has described, full of secret tunnels and rooms. “What keeps the houses from tumbling in?” she wonders aloud. “If you ask me, it doesn’t sound too safe to live above a network of caves.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lucy says.

But when they arrive at the sinkhole, a hundred-foot-long basin where the earth has collapsed in on itself and formed a crater large enough to swallow a house, Martha’s fears seem plausible. Its sloping sides are covered in West Virginia creeper, which they have to push aside to climb down to the cave’s rocky entrance. The passageway is barely wide enough to squeeze through.

“Have we discussed my claustrophobia of late?” Martha asks, flicking on their flashlight.

“Not applicable to caves
at all,
” Lucy responds, entering first. “Your brand of claustrophobia is more about people than space. It’s the whole packed elevator/crowded train thing, and has less to do with the walls closing in than with the fear that you’ll be trapped with strangers who’ll bore you to death.”

“Oh yeah,” Martha says and drops the subject. She looks at her watch. “No more than an hour, right?”

“An hour, tops.”

They wander along single file. The entrance channel is narrow and dark and damp, with several tiny rooms branching off of it.

“This kind of reminds me of my first apartment in New York,” Martha says. “Only it’s bigger and has better light.”

Lucy laughs. “And fewer bugs!”

“Bugs live in caves?”

“Um . . .”

“What about bats?”

Lucy hears genuine panic rising in Martha’s voice and tries to calm her. “Bats have a bad rap. They hardly ever bite, and all that vampire stuff is nonsense.”

The passageway snakes around a bend and then opens up into a huge room, as large as a subway tunnel, with shiny dark walls, slick with water.

“This must be the big chamber.”

“Wow. It’s incredible,” Martha says, touching the slippery walls. She turns her flashlight on and off, amazed at how black this black really is. “Does it just go on like this for miles?”

“I think so.”

“Oh, look at that weird formation,” Martha says, pointing to a stalagmite at the far end of the cavern. They go over to examine it and walk into another passageway that leads them past several smaller rooms and into an even larger chamber.

“Hold up,” Lucy says. “I’m glad to see you getting into the spirit of things, but this damsel wants to find the meeting spot.” They start walking back the way they came, but are startled to discover that every passageway looks the same. Almost immediately, they come to a branch they don’t recall. They pick a direction and pass several other unfamiliar branches. Soon they’re so turned around that they’re not sure if they’re headed out or farther in, or simply going in circles.

Lucy notices lots of bones and teeth on the rocks, which lend a creepy, mortuary feel to the place and makes her think of Cooper’s calf. A slightly opaque brown salamander skitters across a rock and she recalls Cooper once telling her that cave inhabitants become more translucent the farther in they live. Based on that fact, Lucy figures they mustn’t be too lost,
yet,
but there are miles and miles of caves in the area. “How about we sit tight. The men will come looking as soon as Beatrice tells them we’re missing.”

“Good idea,” Martha says, feeling more stupid than scared.
Really
getting lost wasn’t part of the plan. She’s sure Jolene doesn’t do dumb shit like this.

THE CAMPERS SPEND the morning reclaiming the south pasture, which is overgrown with weeds and wildflowers and small trees. Under the dour direction of Roy Snedegar, a quiet, skinny man in overalls, the men take turns using the farm’s small bulldozer to push over saplings, and the bush hog (a lawn mower on steroids) to chew up light brush and shrubs. Adam loads the debris onto a hay wagon and hauls it to a pit where it will be burned. The men who aren’t operating the big machines use chain saws and shovels to remove stumps. By lunchtime, all the campers are ready to quit work except Kurt, who is digging out a stubborn root. “Just let me finish this last one,” he says, wiping his arm across his forehead and leaving a brown smear on his skin.

By the time they return to the farmhouse, they’re almost an hour late and Beatrice is genuinely alarmed, pacing back and forth on the porch with Tor and Tap at her side. She tells the campers that the girls never returned from their spelunking expedition and she hasn’t been able to reach Cooper. She has flashlights lined up in a row on the railing and a bag of red poker chips to use as trail markers.

With the exception of Jesse and Adam, who are sick with worry, the campers are excited at the prospect of saving Lucy and Martha. Without much debate, they make a plan: Kurt assumes authority and sets up a command center in the farmhouse to coordinate information from the field. Adam and Jesse form the primary rescue team and leave with the equipment and dogs, agreeing to return in one hour for a debriefing. Simon and Walter drive into Neola to search for Cooper.

Bryce helps Beatrice with lunch.

MARTHA AND LUCY have been sitting on their rock long enough to sing every Beatles song they can remember, when Lucy notices that their flashlight is dimming. “We better turn that out for a while.”

Martha clicks off the light and it is darker than any darkness either of them has ever experienced.

“Here comes the sun, do-da-do-da,”
Lucy sings, expecting Martha to laugh, but all she hears is water trickling down the cave walls.

“As long as we’re going to die together,” Martha says, “is there anything you feel like you should tell me?”

“Huh?”

“Like some secret or completely humiliating moment that you thought you’d gotten away with?”

“I don’t think so,” Lucy says.

“Come on, I’ll tell you one if you tell me one. I’ll even go first.”

“Fair enough,” Lucy says, hoping that Martha’s story will buy her enough time to come up with one of her own.

Martha begins: “Remember that time we got massages at De-Stress last winter?”

“Yes.”

“And remember how blissed out I was in the steam room afterward?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was because—” Martha stops midsentence and giggles. “It was because the guy massaged my breasts.”

“Are you kidding? That’s disgusting! What did you do?”

“What did I do?”

“I mean, did you report him or call the police?”

“Um, not really,” Martha says, giggling some more. “It wasn’t exactly one-way. I like to think that the music and candles had something to do with it.”

“Jesus, Martha.”

“Is that really the best response you can come up with?”

“Did you tip him?”

Martha nods in the darkness. “Big-time.”

“That’s practically prostitution.”

“Um, Luce,” Martha says. “Here’s the big rule in terms of revelation: You’re not allowed to judge the person. Now, your turn.”

Lucy takes a deep breath of the clammy air, wondering why the temperature in caves is a constant fifty-three degrees.
A secret,
she thinks.
Something embarrassing.
Nothing pops immediately to mind. “I once hugged a bunny to death?” she says, phrasing it more as a question than a statement.