Shelter (1994) (38 page)

"Buddy," Lenny says, "you've been in here? You know the way?"

"I know," Buddy answers.

"We'll stay directly behind you," Lenny says. "We won't go any further than we have to. When we come out, we'll walk with a hand on one another's shoulders, in a line, so no one gets lost." Lenny blinks once. In the yellow bell of light Buddy sees the quiver of two long blond hairs that are caught in her eyelashes. "Buddy," she says, "give me the flashlight."

"I can turn it off," he says, "to show you how black it gets."

"No!" Lenny says, and her hand is at his wrist. She has the light and keeps hold of him, pulling him nearer. "Stand just in front of me. Face forward. There, don't move. Listen," she says to everyone, "we have to go further in, just a little further. Buddy comes in here, other people must."

Buddy shifts in place. He hears them shuffling, wordless, taking up their burden. Lenny nudges him, gives him back the light, keeps one hand on him. He begins to walk, straight back, the way Dad walked. He knows the path runs along the broad wall of the cave, the wall with the writing, but he keeps his eyes on the filmy light at his feet. He doesn't want the cave to come alive, he wants to take them in and out. Behind him, he hears someone crying again, but they all keep walking, steady and still. He stops a moment to play the light along the rock floor. Off to the side, he sees the rumpled shape of the sleeping bag and moves the light back to center quickly. Now they all hear the stream in the dark, a tinkling like music, and they are moving closer to the water, back farther than Buddy has been before. They seem to be walking gradually downward, as though the cave dips low to hold its rattle, to hold whatever runs through it.

"Alma," Lenny says quietly, "you OK?"

"Lenny, it's far enough," she answers. "Delia can't stop crying. She needs—"

"Delia," Lenny says, "soon we'll go out. We will. Soon."

"Go to the water," Delia says.

Buddy stops. The stream sounds close. He feels the rock, damper and colder on his bare feet. He moves forward one step, two, and catches the edge of a shining line with his light. Closer, and he sees the narrow nm, a rocky sluice smaller than it sounds, and as he squats to see it better he slips on the slick stone and sits down hard, dislodging a run of pebbles that seem to skitter down a long slant and fall off an edge to the left. They all wait, motionless, hearing the pebbles fall. The little rocks seem to drop and plunge and drop again, rattling a long way down.

"We're at the stream," Delia says. She has stopped sobbing.

"Buddy," Lenny says. She reaches down and hauls him gently to his feet, pulling him back. "Give me the light for a minute."

The light plays on the stream, though it's not a stream really, just a bright, narrow ditch. They could almost jump across, but the other side is wreathed in darkness. The girls kneel in a tight knot and move forward carefully, on their knees, to the edge. Lenny sweeps her cone of light over the still black water, then holds her other hand just beneath the surface. Buddy finds himself behind them all, in darkness, but he can see the lit water, her wavering hand. In the pool of light something stirs across her palm, disappears, moves across again.

"It's a minnow," Cap says, "a little fish, all white."

"A blind fish, must be," Alma says. "Fish in caves are blind." She puts her hand in the water too, lightly touches her fingertips to Lenny's. The sieve of their fingers draws tighter in the circle of light, but the fish has disappeared.

"We have to put him in the water," Delia says. "The water will hold him."

There's a silence.

"But maybe this water feeds Turtle Hole," Alma says. "Or maybe it feeds into the river. And the river floods. There are rapids. In the spring, the water gets high."

"It does, doesn't it, Buddy," Lenny says. "So high sometimes it breaks the swinging bridge."

"Don't break it," Buddy says. "Never has washed it away. Just takes some of the boards."

Lenny trains the light all round them, picks up a rock, and throws it sideways. Again they hear the long slide, the drop and tumble of an object falling end over end.

"The edge is close," Cap says. "Back behind us, that way. You can hear it."

"Buddy," Lenny says, "you stay exactly where you are. Delia, you stay right beside Buddy. Then Alma, and Cap. We'll move in a line, slowly, so we won't lose each other. I'm going to be in front. I have to find the edge."

"You'll have to crawl," Alma says, "and feel with your hands. Take the light, and feel way out in front of you. I'll hold on to your ankles."

Lenny lights the girls' faces. The three of them well up out of blackness like a reflection on the surface of a pool. "All right. Cap, you hold on to Alma."

"Delia will hold on to me," says Alma.

"Right. Now, everyone but Buddy. Slowly. It's slippery here." Lenny waits for them to get into position, then she moves the light and turns away from them. Buddy sees the yellow cone play over nothing, and he reaches out in the dark to touch Delia. She has knelt beside him, and he feels the top of her head, the soft curls of her hair. He leaves his hand there.

"I'm moving now," Lenny says. "I'm going slow. Everyone will have to move with me. We'll see how far it is."

Buddy hears them, like a string of wary animals in the dark. He closes his eyes so he won't try to see. Even Delia stirs, begins to move.

"Buddy," he hears her say, "you have to kneel down. Hold to my leg, here."

He squats down and feels her take his hand, move it to her ankle. He keeps his face turned toward the stream, toward the sound of the water and its lonely singing, and he can feel the chain of their bodies pulling away from him.

Suddenly he remembers the ring, round and gold, jammed halfway onto Dad's finger. Dad still has the ring. Buddy will have to get it, find Dad's hand in the dark. Now, before the girls come back. He doesn't want them to know about the ring.

"I feel the edge," comes Lenny's voice. "It's here."

Buddy keeps his eyes closed and reaches behind him. He touches Dad's side, his leather belt, his long arm. He feels for Dad's hand. Dad's fingers are curled up, fragile and curved, like he's let go. He doesn't want the ring anymore; he doesn't want anything. The ring is half off Dad's index finger and Buddy turns it gently and pulls it away. He puts the ring in his pocket, his heart pounding: what will he do with it now? He longs for someone's voice, someone to tell him.

Lenny is talking from the dark. "I'm backing up now. Everyone, move back slowly."

Buddy opens his eyes and sees the conical light inch back with her. The light appears dimmer, farther away, and the girls seem to reel it in until they are all at his feet as he stands up. Below him the cone of light reaches out, looking, until it finds the body behind them, a half-naked log with its head wrapped up. Buddy sees the cuffs of the khaki shirt now, hanging from the knot the stranger made when he tied the sleeves tight together. Across the blank of the covered face, dark patches have surfaced like a message or a claim.

"Bleeding," Cap says into her hands.

"No," Lenny says, "wet. It's wet in here. Even the air is wet. Buddy, you hold the flashlight."

She puts the plastic box solidly into his hands, and he aims it toward her, trying to see her, but he only finds her back, her shoulders and Cap's, as they bend over Dad and grab Dad's two flung-out hands. His naked hands. And they pull. They pull until Dad lies in front of the line of girls, and they put his arms straight along his sides.

"It's not far," Lenny says. "And the floor drops down before it stops."

"It stops?" Delia sounds sleepy.

"Like a cliff, " Lenny says.

"And below the cliff there's a long space," Alma says softly, "closed off in the rocks."

"Like a grave," Delia says.

And they are moving the body, turning it before them. Like Dad is a heavy rug, rolled up around some secret. Buddy keeps the light playing over them as they move off. The girls' dark shorts, their hips, don't register in his vision; he just sees the pale, interrupted field of their four white shirts moving in a staggered line.

"Buddy," Lenny calls to him, "don't move. Just hold the light. We'll see by the light to come back to you."

He can hear the girls moving; he strains to hear, but some whispery intervention crowds closer, near him, spirals of hushed murmuring that run over and over each other, fast talk he can't understand, now urgent, now drifting.

He hears Lenny, calling to him. She is saying his name. "Buddy. Buddy? We're at the edge."

He tries to make himself answer, say a word. But he can only think the word he wants to say.

"Buddy?" Lenny is still calling him. "Buddy, was he your father?"

Except I ain't your old block, am I.

Buddy tries to push those words through his brain to his mouth. And he pushes so hard that when he makes a sound he thinks his voice will be a scream. But his voice sounds calm and quiet and the words arrive unbidden. "No," he says, "I had to call him Dad. But he wasn't no part of me."

Silence. Then Lenny says, from over there, "Now, let go."

"No," Delia says, "we should say something. Some kind of prayer."

"For who?" Alma asks.

Lenny's voice. "Then go ahead, Delia, pray."

"A prayer is like asking," Delia says, "because we didn't call the police."

"We didn't call anyone, Delia," Cap says. "No one could change it or make it not happen."

"The police found my father." Delia sounds dreamy, as dreamy as Buddy feels.

"They were supposed to," Lenny says. "He knew they would. All of you wanted them to." Then she calls to Buddy, "Buddy, do you want anyone to find him?"

"No," Buddy says.

"Does your mother want them to find him?"

"No," he says.

He hears them say more but the whispers crowd in between, fast and hushed, and he understands those hurried words are the girls' voices: he's hearing everything they're going to think and not tell, even to each other, years of phrases turned round and round, left here in the dark.

He hears Delia's voice. "What's down there? Is it water?"

"It could be water," Lenny says.

And Buddy knows it is.
Like unto a net
is what they say in services, and they say it every time in the church with blue windows, and in Mam's big Bible at home there's a slick picture in satin colors. Angels flying down to walk on water with the net. Their billowing gowns and open hands. Lightning on one side of heaven and sunrise on the other, and the water leaping up; there were dragons in the water but the angels weren't afraid. That was the kingdom of heaven and the dragnet in their hands, and the good and the evil all taken up.

"Now," Lenny says.

And when they push Dad over, Buddy has crouched down with the light between his feet; he claps his hands over his ears hard but he still hears the waves leaping and crashing around them all. He feels himself float away, dragged and tossed, and there's a pounding like a roll of drums, and air so sweet he opens his mouth to drink, and the voices he finally hears descend through water, parting the white sheets.

The tumble of rocks charting a depth plays on in Lenny's head, distinct and delicate, a far-off clatter that sounds and falls, sounds and falls. But her burden has no sharp edges, lies before them heavy and inert, rolls unevenly. Lenny thinks about rolling down hills, holding her arms above her head and clasping her hands to make her body longer, tighter, and still she bumped over the ground, clumsy and lopsided, until she closed her eyes and concentrated not on speed but on how her body met the spongy grass, turning slowly, more slowly, a slow-motion rotation in the dark that let the ground fill any recess in her body, make her smooth. Sunlight bright red against her closed lids, and when she rolled into the shade that color changed and the grass felt cool. The floor of the cave is cool and damp, no earth anywhere that she can feel, and she remembers the flare of the sun with an intense thirst, as though she could drink it. The dark is so black they could be crawling in space, moored to this rock surface in vast, turning space, and when they let the body go Lenny thinks it might float away from them, released over a chasm it will never find. But it leaves their hands and begins to slide like a bag of earth. The drag of the slide stops abruptly and stops her breath; she reaches forward into nothing, too late. Falling, the body makes no sound at all. Soft, like fruit or meat, empty of the wild force that defined it, empty of anything at all. Abandoned, Lenny thinks, dragged all this way and let go. For the first time, she thinks about his hands on her in the water, how there was a roar all around her, nothing but rage or hunger in him, as though he were an animal with his teeth in his food, and when she wrested Buddy from him the boy was like an object he dropped in order to tear her apart. Death grip: now she knows what it means. And she veers away in her mind as though the feel of him skates fast and vicious inside her, a shadow to sidestep, a remnant.

"Don't turn," she says aloud, quietly. "Back up, straight back. Everyone, move back slowly. Buddy has the light. Stay together and move back to the light."

Lenny hears Delia whispering, making words under her breath, and wonders about the words of the prayer. She can't believe in any prayer made of words: she understands now that she doesn't believe in words at all. None of it translates. Like the taste of the beer her father gave her, sharp and bitter and golden like a potion. And running deep into the field with Alma, urgent and fast, driving her with a long weed they pretend is a coachman's whip, both of them so young the waving grasses rush at their faces. Alma's body flickers through tall stalks and both of them fly, fly away, and their father watches from the yard, not calling them back. And Camp Shelter the first night, throbbing with sound in the dark, the shrills and trells of unknown, miraculous creatines pressed against the canvas of the tent in moonlight; Lenny and Cap sitting on their bunks, looking at each other, listening. Those were prayers, and crying was, and groaning. Standing in Cap's mother's closet, looking together at the clothes she'd left behind: that was praying. Delia was wrong; a prayer didn't have to ask. A prayer could be brave enough not to ask at all. When they were all at Turtle Hole, separate and together among the rocks in the dusk, that was a prayer, and that prayer held them together at the water when he came. It was why no one ran away, even when Lenny told them to. It was why they all hit him after Cap couldn't stop him moving: because it was done, come upon them, and they took it on together, closed themselves in. Whatever happened would happen to all of them. And Buddy, Buddy had been praying all his life. Walking and running and living in his house.