The Genocides (18 page)

Now the tubers of the fruit, which had been forming for years, took on a fine, autumnal richness. The airy floss at their cores, receiving their final supplies of food from the leaves above, thickened to the consistency of whipped egg white.

In both hemispheres, the Plant was coming to the end of a long season, and now, at regular intervals over the green earth, there descended from the spring skies gleaming spheres so immense that each one, landing, crushed several of the Plants under its ponderous bulk. Viewed from the proper distance, the landscape would have resembled a bed of clover overspread with gray basketballs.

These gray basketballs basked a few hours in the sun, then extruded, from apertures at their bases, hundreds of exploratory cilia, each of which moved toward a nearby Plant and with tidy, effective little drill bits, began to bore down through the woody stem into the hollow of the root below. When a satisfactory passage had been opened, the cilium was drawn back into the gray basketbalL

The harvest was being prepared.

Neil had gone three times about the circle of rope he had fashioned to trap Buddy, and he was beginning, dully, to sense that he had been caught in his own snare (though how it had happened he did not yet understand). Then, as he had feared, Buddy could be heard returning along the root. Blossom and Orville were with him, all of them laughing! At him? He had to hide, but there was nowhere to hide, and he didn’t want to hide from Blossom anyhow. So he said, “Uh, hi.” They stopped laughing.

“What are you doing
here?”
Buddy asked.

“Well, you see, uh…. This rope here, it keeps … No, that’s not it, either.” The more he talked, the more confused he became, and the more impatient Buddy.

“Oh, never mind then. Come along. I’ve found Blossom. And Orville too. Let’s round up the others now. It’s spring. Haven’t you noticed the slime—Hey—what’s this?” He had found the point where the end of his own rope was knotted to its own middle. “This surely isn’t the intersection where we left each other. I’d remember if I’d gone down any root as small as this.”

Neil didn’t know what to do. He wanted to hit his snoopy brother over the head, that’s what he wanted to do, and shoot Orville, just blast his brains out. But he sensed that this had better be done away from Blossom, who might not understand. Then too, when you’re lost the most important thing is to get home safe. When you’re home safe, things won’t seem so muddled as when you’re lost.

A whispered conversation was going on among Buddy, Orville and Blossom. Then Buddy said: “Neil, did you—”

“No! I don’t know how … it just must of
happened!
It’s not
my
fault!”

“Well, you dumb clod!” Buddy began to laugh. “Why, if you had to saw a limb off a tree, I swear you’d sit on the wrong side to do it. You’ve tied my line in a circle, haven’t you?”

“No, Buddy, honest to God! Like I said, I don’t know how—”

“And you didn’t bring your own line along so you could get back. Oh, Neil, how do you do it? How do you always find a way?”

Orville and Blossom joined Buddy’s laughter. “Oh,
Neil!”
Blossom cried out. “Oh,
Neil!”

That made Neil feel good, to hear Blossom say his name like that, and he began to laugh along with everybody else. The joke was on him!

Surprisingly, it seemed that Buddy and Orville weren’t going to make a big stink. Maybe they knew what was good for them!

“It seems we’ll have to find our way back as best we can,” Orville said with a sigh, when they were all done laughing. “Neil, would you like to lead the way?”

“No,” Neil said, somber again and touching the Python in his holster for assurance. “No, I’ll be the leader, but I’ll bring up the rear.”

An hour later they had come up against a dead end, and they knew they were thoroughly lost. It was no longer possible to shatter the capillaries with a wave of one’s arm. They were swollen with sap and resilient. It would have been no more difficult to crawl through a honeycomb than through the unopened hollows. They were compelled therefore to stay strictly within the bounds of paths already blazed. Thanks to Anderson’s explorations, there were quite enough of these. Quite too many.

Orville summed up their situation. “It’s back to the subbasement, my dears. We’ll have to take another elevator to get to the ground floor.”

“Wha’d you say?” Neil asked.

“I said—”

“I heard what you said! And I don’t want you to use that word again, understand? You remember who’s leader here, huh?”

“What word, Neil?” Blossom asked.

“
My dears!”
Neil screamed. Neil had always been able to scream when he felt the occasion called for it. He was not overcivilized, and the primordial was very close to the surface of his mind. It seemed to grow closer all the time.

The quiet, which for months had been absolute, was broken by the trickling of the sap. It was a sound like the sound of water in early spring, flowing through the town gutters underneath unmelted banks of snow.

While they rested they did not speak, for the most innocuous statements could throw Neil into a state of hysterical excitement. Naturally, they knew better than mention Anderson or Alice, but why, when Buddy began to worry out loud about his wife and son, should Neil complain that he was “selfish,” that all he thought about was sex? When Orville spoke of their predicament and speculated (with more good cheer than he felt) on their chances of reaching the surface, Neil thought they were blaming him. Silence seemed altogether the best policy, but Neil could not endure more than a few moments of silence either. Then he would start to complain: “If only we’d brought down the lamp, we wouldn’t be having any trouble now.” Or, remembering one of his father’s favorite themes: “Why do I have to do the thinking for everybody? Why is that?”

Or he would whistle. His favorite tunes were the
Beer-Barrel Polka
,
Red River Valley
,
Donkey Serenade
(which he accompanied percussively with the popping of his cheeks), and the theme from
Exodus
. Once he had started any of these, he could go on perpetuum mobile for the duration of the time they rested. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been able to stay in the same key for eight bars running.

It was hardest for Buddy. Blossom and Orville had each other. In the darkness they would hold each other’s hands, while Neil ground out the tune one more time around, like a diligent monkey; they could even kiss, quietly.

Here there was neither north nor south, east nor west; there was only up and down. There were no measurable units of distance, only rough estimates of temperature and depth, and their only measure of elapsed time was the time it took their bodies to drop, too exhausted to continue without another rest.

They never knew whether they were at the periphery or near the heart of labyrinth. They might ascend, through channels already opened, to within a few hundred feet—or even ten—of the surface only to find themselves at a dead end. It was necessary not simply to find a way up but to find
the
way up. It was hard to make Neil understand why this was so. When Blossom had explained it to him, he had seemed to agree, but later when Orville brought up the subject again, the argument started all over.

They were soaked through with their own sweat and with the sap, which in the least steep roots reached levels of four and five inches. After hours of climbing they were at a height where the heat was not so overwhelming (the lower depths felt like a sauna), and the air seemed to be gas again. Orville estimated the temperature as seventy-five, which placed them a probable fifteen hundred feet from the surface. Ordinarily, over a known route, they could have climbed that height in little more than three hours. Now it might very well take days.

Orville had hoped that the flow of sap would abate as they reached higher levels; instead it was worsening. Where did it all come from? The logistics of the Plant’s water supply was something he had never stopped to consider. Well, he couldn’t stop now either.

You couldn’t just grab hold of a vine and haul yourself up the slope; you had to make your hand into a sort of hook and slip it into a stirrup. You couldn’t just reach back and help the next person up after you; you had to grapple the two hooks together. So it was always the hands that hurt worst and were first to give out. You’d hang there and feel them letting loose, and you’d hope that you wouldn’t slide back with the sap too far. Once you let go, it wasn’t so bad—you’d slide along soft and easy if the slope wasn’t too steep, or else shoot down like a toboggan, until you came up against someone or something with a bump, and then you had to get your hooks bent back into shape and start clawing your way back up through the slime. But you knew your body could go a long way yet, and you hoped that would be far enough.

They might have been climbing twelve or twice twelve hours. They had eaten and rested a few times, but they had not slept. They had not slept, in fact, since before the night of Anderson’s dying and Maryann’s delivery. Now it must be night again. Their minds were leaden with the necessity for sleep.

“Absolute necessity,” Orville repeated.

Neil objected. This was just going to be a resting period. He feared that if he went to sleep first, they would take away his gun. They weren’t to be trusted. But if he just sat here and let his body
relax
… dog-tired, that’s what he….

He was the first to sleep after all, and they didn’t take his gun. They didn’t care. They didn’t want his gun: they only wanted to sleep.

Neil’s repertoire of dreams was no larger than his stock of songs. First he dreamed his baseball dream. Then he was walking up the stairs of the old house in town. Then he dreamed of Blossom. Then he dreamed his baseball dream again, except this time it was different: when he opened the closet door, his father was the first baseman. Blood spurted from the deep cleft of the first baseman’s mitt, which opened and closed, opened and closed, in the dead man’s hand. But otherwise the dreams were just the same as always.

The next day, after an hour or so, the hurt went out of their hands, and it was the stickiness that was hardest to endure. Their clothes clung to their straining limbs or hung loose and heavy like skins that could not be sloughed off. “We’d move faster,” Orville said, “if we weren’t weighted down with these denim jackets.”

Somewhat later, since it appeared that the idea was not going to come to Neil of itself, Buddy added, “If we knotted our jackets together, sleeve to sleeve, and used them for rope, we could climb faster.”

“Yeah,” Neil said, “but you’re forgetting there’s a lady with us.”

“Oh, don’t bother about
me
,” Blossom protested.

“Just our jackets, Neil. It wouldn’t be any different than going swimming.”

“No!” The strident tone was creeping into his voice again. “It wouldn’t be
right!”
There was no use arguing with him once he had made up his mind. He was their leader.

The next time they stopped to rest and eat, the sap was raining down on them in great globs, like the waterdrops that announce a summer-thunderstorm. The central stream of sap flowing through the root was now well over their ankles. As soon as they were not quite sopping wet, their clothes stuck to them like suits of adhesive tape. They could move freely only when they were drenched.

“I can’t stand it any longer,” Blossom said, beginning to cry. “I can’t
stand
it.”

“There now, Miss Anderson. Chin up! Tally-ho! Remember the Titanic!”

“Stand what?” Neil asked.

“These clothes,” she said. And indeed that was a part of what she couldn’t stand.

“Oh, I guess she’s right,” Neil said, as uncomfortable as the others. “It can’t hurt if we just take off our jackets. Hand them to me, and I’ll knot the sleeves together.”

“Good idea!” Orville said. They all handed their jackets to Neil.

“Blossom!” he said. “I didn’t mean
you
. It isn’t right.” She didn’t say anything. Neil sort of giggled. “Well, if that’s the way you want it,” he said.

The stuff gushed from the small opening above as from a burst water main. Quite properly, it could not be called sap. It was more like water. For a while they were happy because it cleaned them off. But it was cold, too cold.

The roots, as they ascended through them, had been growing smaller instead of larger. To get through them now they had to crawl on hands and knees, and even so they could scrape their heads on the ceiling if they weren’t careful. The water was up to their elbows.

“I think,” Orville said cautiously, “that we’re coming up underneath Lake Superior. This much water can’t be coming from spring thaws.” He waited for Neil to protest. Then, still more cautiously: “I think we’ll have to go back the way we came. Let’s hope we have better luck a second time.”

The reason Neil had not protested was that he had not heard. Orville’s voice had been drowned out by the roar of the water, which acres and acres of thirsty Plants were siphoning from the lake bottom. Orville explained his theory several times over when they had backed off to a quieter spot. Then Blossom tried.

“Neil, look, it’s very simple—the only way away from the lake is
down
. Because if we try to move along at
this
level, we can as easily be going east—farther on into the lake—as west—away from it. If we had the lamp, we could use your compass, but we don’t have the lamp. We might just go along north or south and follow the shore. There’s no telling how much area beneath the lake Daddy explored last winter. We just have to go
down
. Do you understand?”

Orville took advantage of this occasion to have some private words with Buddy: “What the hell—let’s leave him here if he doesn’t want to go with us. It’ll be his own fault if he drowns.”

“No,” said Buddy, “that wouldn’t be
right
. I want to do this by the book.”

“Okay, I’ll go,” Neil told Blossom, “but I think it’s a lot of hooey. I’m only agreeing for your sake. Remember that.”

Down: the sap was in spate. It jostled their bodies together or tore them apart as casually as floodwaters bearing off the trees of the riverbank. Strong currents dashed them against the walls of the root wherever the curves were too sharp or too steep. Days of climbing were retraced in minutes.