Monday, Monday: A Novel (25 page)

“Except go to the play.”

“Except go to the play for the fourth time when there’s somewhere else she’s needed. And she did offer. Come on, sweetie.”

“It’s just that there’s something about her that feels out of bounds. Like a line I can’t cross, or something. Some secret.”

“Plenty of secrets. Plenty of things that could surprise you. Not about her character—that’s always going to be solid. But certainly about her life. I bet there would be some things about your life that would surprise her, too. For instance, on just a small scale, how did those beer caps happen to get in our backyard last weekend when we were out and you had your friends over?”

“You found those?”

“Seven, to be exact.”

“Those guys who came with Carol were drinking.”

“Next time tell them to drink in somebody else’s backyard.”

“You didn’t tell Mom?”

“No.”

By the time they reached Highway 41 toward Rocksprings, the sun had gone below the horizon, but the sky was still light. The land was flatter here, and there was almost no traffic for a long stretch. Madeline got behind the wheel to practice driving. Finally her father directed her onto a white caliche road. “Easy on the clutch,” he said. She drove through an open gate and rolled her window down, flooding the car with the pungent smell of cedars. The sky had turned purple, and a scooped moon was rising over rocky pastureland dotted with scrub oak and prickly pear.

Rounding a curve, the car lights suddenly swung onto a figure running toward them down the road. He was young—a teenager—and a harness of some kind dangled off him. He waved his arms wildly. “My girlfriend’s down the hole! I can’t get her out!”

Madeline pulled to a stop and the boy came to the window. He was thin and wore a ball cap with a logo for Detroit Diesel, and his hands were bleeding. The fingernails looked like they’d been scraped off. One was attached but bent all the way back. He was panting hard and sweating. “She’s hanging from a rope down the hole and she’s hurt—I think her ribs are broken!” he cried. “I can’t get her out! It’s the wrong kind of rope—she’s twirling in circles. She can’t breathe right!”

“Get in the car,” Dan said, and changed places with Madeline. He drove so fast she shut her eyes. When the car stopped and Madeline opened her eyes, she saw her father running with the boy, the headlights tossing their shadows into patches of prickly pear. The light shone on cactus needles and skimmed through yellow grass, then dropped away abruptly, plunging into an abyss.

Madeline got out and steadied herself. The monstrous hole might have looked like nothing more than a still pond of black water on the level landscape if the moon had been reflected, but the light of the moon fell into the hole just as the headlights did—suddenly and totally. An old white pickup, missing its tailgate, was backed up to the cavernous pit. It gleamed in the light of the rising moon, its back end drooping lopsidedly where one of the wheels was over the edge. A rope tied underneath stretched down into the pit. Madeline heard a sound—a high, thin wailing coming out of the hole—an echoing supplication circling up from the depths along with the rank smell of bat guano and drifting into the open spaces over the rocky pasture.

“Amanda!” the boy screamed down. “We’re here! I got help!” He paced at the edge, fretfully yanking the ball cap off and on, his eyes darting with fear.

“Does her harness have leg straps, or is it like yours?” Dan demanded.

“It’s the same as mine. Oh God, can we get her up?”

“No leg straps?”

“No sir, it’s a telephone harness like this one. My dad works at the phone company so I just—”

“Is that the only rope you have?”

“Yes sir. But I’ve got a Jumar too.”

“How long has she been down there?”

“We went down a few hours ago and—”

“I mean how long has she been hanging there?”

“I’ve been trying to get her up—”

“How long?”

“A long time. Is she going to die? Oh God, is she—”

“Tie your shoes.”

“Sir?”

“Tie your laces.”

The boy squatted to tie them.

Madeline watched her father crawl half under the truck and examine the rope where it stretched over the rim and down into the hole. She approached but held back from the edge, afraid of what she would see. The girl was calling from below, her voice an echoing moan.

“We’re here!” the boy screamed down to her. “We’re here!” His teeth were chattering. Swallows circled overhead, laying their wings flat against their bodies and diving jetlike into the opening.

“How did she get there—did she fall?” Dan demanded as he got to his feet.

“We were down there and she was scared to come back up so I came up to show her, but then it was hard for her to climb, and she was tired out when she got up here—oh God!”

“She fell from the top?”

“Yes sir, she was standing right here, and then … She was trying to get the rope off and it got tangled around her feet or something, and then she just—”

“Okay—”

“She just was gone! She didn’t fall all the way to the bottom ’cause the rope got tangled up in the Jumar! I got one Jumar here, but the other one’s down there and the rope’s wadded up in a rat’s nest under her butt. She’s spinning! Ah God! Do you see her? I’m so scared!”

“Settle down and get hold of yourself.”

“And I couldn’t go nowhere for help ’cause she’s tied to the truck. I tried driving it forward to pull her out but it seemed like the rope was going to get sawed off by the rim, and I tried backing up to lower her down, but she’s about a hundred feet up from the bottom—and my wheel went over. I’ll do whatever you say. I’ll do—”

“Listen to me.”

The boy bent over, breathing hard, his hands on his knees.

“Look at me.”

“Yes sir.”

“Straighten up. Look at me. Calm down. We’re going to help her.”

Madeline wanted to run from here, to get back in the car and hide her face and shut her eyes. She wanted to be anywhere but here in this descending darkness. “Do you want me to drive for help?” she called to her father. She had never driven alone before, but thought that she could do it.

“No, there’s no time.”

The girl was pleading from the hole, her voice a freakish wuthering sound rising out of the depths.

The boy said, “I can try to pull the truck forward—”

Dan had started running toward the Bronco. “Don’t touch the truck,” he said over his shoulder. “We can’t risk cutting the rope. We’ll do it another way.”

The Bronco’s headlights shone like stage lights. The boy’s hands bled. His fingernail extended straight up from his finger, and Madeline couldn’t look at it. She got on her hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the pit to see down into it. The depth shocked her. This was more than a hole. It was an entrance to another world. Dizzy, she settled flat on her belly.

The overhang on which she lay was three feet thick and dropped away into nothing. Below, the girl hung so far down in the dusky light that she looked like a tiny acrobat, revolving in a slow circle, faceup, her head bent back, her hair flowing, her legs swinging loose.

Madeline stared at the overhang that encircled the empty space. The truck was a few yards away, the rear of the open bed sagging over the precipice, the rope tied to the axle stretched tight across the lip and then descending straight down, as if the weight that hung from it could drag the truck backward into the hole at any moment. The walls deep down were darkly shadowed, trickling water, overgrown with spongy moss. Mud nests of swallows hung in clusters on shallow ledges. Twilight ventured only as far down as the girl, who dangled over a cushion of darkness.

Dan got in the Bronco and drove it up close to the edge, aiming the headlights at the pickup. He grabbed a tow strap from the back of the Bronco and handed Madeline a flashlight. “Stay on your stomach as long as you’re at the edge.”

“Amanda!” the boy screamed. “We’re going to get you out!”

Lying on the speckled limestone beside tufts of speargrass, Madeline shone the flashlight into the cavern. Warmth leached out of the stone against her stomach as twilight turned to night. The girl became invisible, the rope vanishing into the dark like a fishing line in murky water. She was only a voice now, calling the boy’s name faintly. She whimpered, feebly calling that she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t feel her legs.

Madeline swung the light onto the tow strap as it slithered into the dark. She could see no way her father could climb down into the hole and bring the girl back up. Even if the strap proved long enough, and he managed to tie it onto something and get down over the treacherous rim, how could he rescue the girl? He knew about rocks and climbing from his work, but he wouldn’t be wrestling with rocks down there. He would be wrestling with air. There was nothing even to shove his feet against once he dropped over the edge.

A small dark object fluttered up through Madeline’s beam of light, like a leaf carried up by a gust of wind. A curious stirring sound rose from the hole. The smell was dank and putrid, as if the hole had started to breathe, and the girl below called out, her words lost in the eerie beat of wings and a strange collective chattering. Dan shouted down, “I’ve lowered a tow strap down there. Can you see it?”

Her answer had a vibration, as if distorted by the pattering wings of the bats. “No, I can’t see it. I can’t breathe. Please help me.”

Madeline watched her father in the bright headlights as he stood holding the end of the tow strap. It would reach no farther down. His shadow stretched over the limestone and dropped over the rim as if tumbling into the hole. He pulled the useless tow strap out and tossed it onto the ground.

The bats rose in greater numbers, interfering with the moonlight. Madeline swiped at them, crawling backward from the hole, and got to her feet. The night was drained of color, reduced to the white lights and the white truck, the white moon, the dark bats. Her father appeared in front of her, setting his hands on her shoulders, but she couldn’t make sense of his words. The bats frightened her, stirring a hot, foul breeze as they whirled around her.

“Do you understand?” her father asked above their muffled piping. “It’s our only chance to get her out before she suffocates from the rope.”

“What are you going to do?”

But then, looking at his face, she knew.

The boy stepped in and out of the light, shouting into the hole. Bats blackened the air, spiraling toward the moon. Madeline looked at the truck, its back wheel over the edge. She looked at the rope, the hole. Guano fell from the sky, drifting through the headlights’ glare like flakes of snow.

“Don’t, Daddy.” Her voice shook.

He closed his arms around her, and whispered, “Madeline, I have to do this. I have to. I’ll use the tow strap to get down over the edge; then I can get on the rope and go down and bring her up.”

She pleaded with him. “The rope won’t hold you both … You said it could break—”

But he was talking with the boy now, getting things from him, strapping the boy’s harness around his own waist.

She felt alone already. She wanted the girl to stop calling for help—to fall … to die … anything that would stop her father from going down in the hole.

He held something up for her to see. “This is a Jumar; it goes on the rope. Guess who invented it?”

He spoke as he tied things and made knots, doing his story thing again—the trick he had always done. When she was younger and frightened, he would distract her with some nonsense story. “I don’t care, Daddy.”

“A birder. A Swiss man, so he could sit in trees.”

“Daddy, I don’t care—”

“He would use a pair of these to climb up and down a rope tied high up in a tree, and perch there with a bottle of wine and binoculars and watercolors. The villagers thought he was a lunatic.”

Madeline looked at the thing he held in his fist—gray, metal, alien.

“This is a handle, see? And here’s the jaw.” He opened it and showed her the teeth. “It grabs the rope. Then I can stand in the stirrup.” He held up a dirty white sling attached to the Jumar. “See how easy it is?”

But she couldn’t imagine her father standing on one foot in the midair dark.

He was cutting a piece from the tow strap with his pocketknife and tying it into a loop. “The only problem is, I need two,” he said as he worked. “One for my right foot, one for my left. They slide up the rope. It’s like walking. I can go up or down. Simple. So here’s my second stirrup.”

“Please, Daddy,” she whispered.

“We can do this,” he said. “I’ll use the tow strap to get down over the rim, then move onto the rope and go down and untangle the girl so we can lower her down to the bottom where she can breathe. If I can’t untangle her, I’ll bring her up.” He hugged Madeline, the sling flapping against her back. The strength of the embrace surprised her. Don’t let go, she thought. But he already had.

She held the light as he adjusted the harness and cut another section from the strap. He did his magic with it, looping it into a seat that he wrapped around his thighs. He told the boy to give him one of his shoelaces. The boy was leaning over the hole, his hands on his knees, and he looked at Dan skeptically for only a second before backing away from the hole, untying a shoelace, and yanking it from his shoe. Dan took it and tied the ends together. “The poor man’s substitute for a Jumar,” he said. “It’s called a Prusik loop. Guess who invented it.” He flashed a smile at Madeline.

“Stop it, Daddy.”

“Looks pretty Mickey Mouse, I know, but it works.”

Everything was happening too fast for Madeline to make sense of. She quit trying to understand. She just wanted it over. He crawled under the truck and tied the tow strap to the axle, alongside the rope. Madeline crouched, peering under, breathing the sickening odor of axle grease and shining the beam on his hands to light what he was doing.

There were no more jokes when he came out from under the truck. He tossed the slack end of the tow strap into the hole, looped the shoelace around it, and backed up to the abyss. Slowly he put his weight on the strap, causing the knots to creak and the truck to groan. He didn’t look at Madeline, as if he didn’t dare. Drawing a deep breath, he began to lower himself over the edge.