Blind Descent-pigeion 6 (17 page)

  Zeddie was the quickest to respond. She scuttled up the newly fallen scree to where the taps emanated from. In her haste she started another rock slide, a tiny one this time, but enough to remind them how inherently unstable the slope was. Deep in timeless and un-weathered earth, jagged corners unsoftened by the influence of wind or water, breakdown was cemented in place with a dry mortar of silt that had filtered down fine as dust over the centuries. Without external forces to act upon it, this bedding went untested through soundless, lightless years. Once the delicate fabric was disturbed, it flowed like sand through an hourglass, trickling from beneath, shifting rocks that had been held unmoving for eons.

  Having undipped a carabiner from a belt loop on her trousers, Zeddie rapped it smartly against a stone. No reply.

  "I think it's too light," she said, meaning the aluminum alloy of the 'biner.

  McCarty dug a hammer from his pack, possibly the kind used to tap on patients' knees. "Try this," he said, and tossed it. Fortunately Zed-die's hand was sure even in the faint and shifting light, and she caught it. This deep within the earth nothing could afford to be casual. Greater threats than Hodags were ready to make mischief at every turn. Shadows waiting to swallow tools, holes to snap bones, passages like mazes to capture lost souls.

  Hostile work environment, Anna thought, and no one to sue.

  Using the hammer, Zeddie banged three times in quick succession. Three raps came back and the cavers sent up a ragged cheer that ended as spontaneously as it had begun.

  "Does anybody know Morse code?" Oscar asked hopefully.

  "SOS," Zeddie offered. They all knew SOS.

  "I think that's been established," Iverson said dryly.

  Another flurry of taps were exchanged for the reassurance of both parties. Nothing of moment could be transmitted, but the message that they were not alone, not forgotten, that help was on the way was enough.

  "How long do you think it will take them to get through?" Brent said, and Anna was grateful he'd saved her from being the first to ask.

  Holden and Oscar looked at each other in mute conference. Holden shrugged. "I'd only be guessing," Oscar said.

  "Guess," Anna demanded, unable to help herself.

  "A day. Maybe two."

  Anna's heart shriveled up till it felt the size of a wizened lemon. "Twenty-four-hour days or eight-hour days?"

  "Could go either way," he replied unhelpfully.

  Holden took over. "We got nothing to dig with and the best we can do to help is get out of the way. They're going to be pushing out on this slope, and it'll slide again before they're done. We've all put in close to a nineteen-hour day. Everybody's shot. Till we've rested we're just accidents waiting to happen. We'll set up a base of operations back at the other end of this hole. We've got beaucoup water. Rapunzel goes down forever. This cave's got enough air to be considered a wind tunnel in some parts of the world, and we've got food. Lechuguilla's warm and dry. All we've got to do is get comfy and wait for the cavalry to arrive. My guess is old Oscar here is being conservative. We only need wiggle room, not the Holland Tunnel. We'll be out of here in eight or ten hours. Let's go spread the good word."

  Though he'd chosen to be brave, macho, noble, and all the things that Anna and, she was sure, the others, had hoped he would be, Tillman remained a cautious man. Because of his ankle he tied himself between Oscar and Brent, the strongest of those in their truncated group. It could have been argued that McCarty was sturdier than Iverson, but he hadn't recovered from the trauma of the avalanche or Frieda's death-whatever demons stopped his voice and drained the blood from his lips.

  Consumed by an all-encompassing fatigue, Anna was unable to take much interest in McCarty's well-being. Body, mind, and spirit were exhausted. The ache in her arm and her fear of falling kept her awake. The lure of the lamp kept her moving forward. She'd come to believe there were no flat level places in all of the inner space of Lechuguilla. The "trail" they'd been calling the goat track was like the dotted line on a cartographer's drawing; it existed only in their minds. Reality was a stretch of rock that could be navigated only by borrowing from the traveling techniques of spiders, monkeys, starfish, and weasels.

  On the careful trek back, McCarty was in line behind Anna, taking up the last position. "Sondra?" he said with the startled intonation of a man remembering a package left behind in a taxicab. He had to say it a second time before the import penetrated Anna's haze of self-absorption.

  "Sondra?" she echoed stupidly, and ceased all movement to summon the energy required to process the idea. "Zeddie!" she hollered when the thought had percolated through the layers of dulled emotion.

  "Yeah?" Zeddie called back. Anna could just see her, down on all fours like a muddy St. Bernard, fifteen or twenty feet ahead.

  "Is Sondra back with Curt?"

  A moment's silence followed, then the almost inevitable response: "Wasn't she with you?"

  Anna swiveled her head to see if the message had reached the doctor. It was the only part of her anatomy she felt she could disturb without danger of dislodging her corpus from the rock face. With the poor light and the distance, she could scarcely read his reaction, but it looked as if as much guilt as worry. Maybe he realized how late in coming was this concern for his missing spouse. Anna studied him an instant longer, trying to see if relief mixed with concern on his face. If it did, she missed it.

  "She told me she was going to rotate out," Anna remembered.

  Now the doctor did look relieved, and Anna mirrored the sentiment. Intrigue in addition to all else that had happened might have proved to be the proverbial straw.

  Camp was luxurious by caving standards: there was a fairly flat spot for everyone to lie down on. At Holden's insistence, food was eaten. Most were so tired they would have forgone the meal to avoid the effort of lifting the spoon from container to mouth. Understanding the need to fuel the body, Anna ate mechanically. The disappearance of Sondra was hashed and rehashed. The four cavers who had taken up the rear position on the Pigtail had spoken to her early on during the rigging but hadn't seen her since the actual haul began. Anna dutifully repeated her hopeful tale of Sondra's opting to rotate out. No one had seen her going ahead with the others, but such was the crush of cavers and the business of the traverse they might easily have missed her. She'd not told her husband of her plans. None but the four newcomers seemed to think that unusual. Anna wasn't the only one who'd noted the relationship between Peter and Sondra was strained.

  Consensus was that Sondra had gone out. Either that or she lay under the rock and dirt of the slide. Despite the slimness of this possibility, Anna knew Holden would have spent the night digging but for the fact that by the time Peter McCarty had mentioned she was missing it was too late, she'd have been long dead. Holden wasn't one to risk the living for the dead no matter how good it might look on paper.

  Chewing, swallowing, drinking warm water, it occurred to Anna that Peter might have waited on purpose. A rock slide would be a convenient end to an inconvenient marriage. Anna had no idea what power Sondra thought she had to jerk her husband's medical license, but if it was true and half an hour's malicious silence could remove the threat for all time . . .

  Anna's punch-drunk brain fumbled at the thought for a while, then let it go. Odds were against it. At any rate it would be unprovable.

  Oscar and Holden did a commendable job with their pep talks. Oscar's was filtered through fatigue and Holden's a near-crippling sense of guilt, but they served their purpose. The team was given hope and cohesion. Lisa, the long-braided caver who had been trapped with the core group, was a practicing Buddhist. She said a prayer for Frieda that Anna was too tired to follow, but she appreciated the gesture.

  One by one they made the creeping journey from their bivouac to the mouth of the Pigtail where there was a good "squatting rock" and they could perform their evening ablutions. Limited space precluded both a ladies' room and a men's, so an empty water bottle was set in the trail. If the bottle was upright, the loo was available, if on its side, occupado.

  Throughout the bustling and munching, the coming and going, Holden and Oscar sat huddled in conversation. If asked a direct question or detecting a need of a team member, they would break from their tête-à-tête, only to return to it the moment they were no longer wanted. They spoke so quietly Anna couldn't discern individual words. She didn't have to. She knew as surely as if she sat with them that they were rigging and rerigging the traverse, mentally stalking around the anchor boulder, asking each other if they could have seen something that signaled instability, if they'd missed a tell-tale sign that might have saved Frieda's life. Unless cause and effect were established, this was a conversation Holden Tillman was going to have with himself for many years to come.

  Finally, tucked in close as sardines in a can, the cavers bedded down. Anna was sandwiched between Curt Schatz and Lisa. Where she would have expected a deepening of claustrophobia, she found comfort. Lamps were extinguished. Before the heavy night of the underground could oppress, Zeddie began to sing. Her rich alto reverberated from the stone and filled all the cracks and crevices with humanity, pushing back the unforgiving dark. A truth Anna had long suspected was ratified: we are one another's angels. No unearthly sound could have been so glorious.

  "Life is like a mountain railroad with an engineer that's brave. We must make the run successful from the cradle to the grave," soared through their miserable night, powered by notes of youth, tones of raw faith in the inherent goodness of existence. Old-time gospel had a healing power bloodless intellectual faith could not lay claim to.

  Sleep came before the song ended, not in the pleasant drift Anna was accustomed to, but with the suddenness of a trapdoor falling shut. Deep and dreamless, a little death, it held her paralyzed for a time, then loosed her into the conscious world as rudely as it had snatched her from it.

  In an instant she was hideously awake, clawing at the air above in a vain attempt to rip away the suffocating tonnage of bedrock. Her heart pounded and her breath came in staccato gasps. A light, she needed a light in order to breathe. Elbowing her companions, she dug into her pockets for the little Maglite she had rescued from her pack.

  A heavy hand closed on her shoulder, the weight of an arm was laid across her chest. "Anna, it's Curt," came a whisper in her ear. "Are you okay? Do you know where you are?"

  Whether it was the human contact or the fact her fingers closed around the shaft of the Maglite, she wasn't sure, but the panic ebbed slightly.

  "The twilight zone?" she whispered back.

  He must have smiled; she felt his beard tickle her cheek. "Do you have to go to the bathroom? Do you want a drink of water?"

  Reassured by the childhood litany, Anna breathed out slowly. "I'm old enough to be your mother," she said to cover the fact his simple stratagem was working.

  "You're old enough to be my sister," he corrected her. "I always thought she was pretty hot stuff. If you let me watch you put on your makeup, I'll be your slave."

  "Believe it or not, I've been known to wear it." Lipstick and perfume seemed far away, artifacts from a past life. Reflexively she raised her hand to touch her face, count the creases time had carved there. A furry brush stroked her cheek, and she realized she clutched a feathery rope-end in her fist, caught up, no doubt, in her scrabble from sleep. It took a second to figure out where she'd come by such an oddment. It was the end of one of Lisa's braids. Stealthily, though the darkness had masked her thievery, Anna put the pigtail back on its owner's chest.

  Rolling onto her shoulder, she groaned as the bruised flesh reminded her of her transgressions.

  "If I let you use me as a pillow will you stop squirming and go back to sleep?" Curt whispered.

  "I'll try," Anna promised.

  Schatz raised his arm so she could move onto her uninjured side and rest her head on his shoulder. Anna didn't know if he was a Boy Scout, an opportunist, or a friend when she needed one. She didn't much care. His warmth brought her courage, the sound of his heart beating soothed her like the ticking of a clock is said to soothe orphaned puppies.

  Curt's breathing evened out, but sleep refused to return for Anna. Shielding the glow so it wouldn't disturb her bedmates, Anna flicked on the Mag. Brent was missing, and down the stoop-walk corridor to the rift she could see the water bottle in the "occupied" position. Even the time-honored remedy for insomnia of going to the bathroom and getting a snack was denied her.

  Encased in perfect darkness the meager brilliance of her covered light showed everything clearly. Pressed between Lisa and Holden, Peter lay next to Zeddie. Like she and Curt, they'd found a degree of solace in each other's arms. Zeddie's head nestled in the crook of Peter's neck. His arm and one knee were thrown across her body. The embrace looked practiced; there was an ease of familiarity in the intimacy. Embarrassed, Anna turned off the light. She remembered Sondra's accusations. "Everybody's laughing themselves sick at my expense," Sondra had said, and, "Is there anything you wouldn't do to make yourself necessary to women?" That smacked of a fight over infidelity. Peter had said something about Frieda, then Sondra said, "Maybe I wasn't talking about Frieda." Zeddie. She'd been talking about Zeddie.