The Ruins (15 page)

 While
Mathias was quickly braiding this final addition, Jeff took Amy aside. "Are you okay with this?" he asked.

 They
were standing together on the square of dirt where the blue tent had
formerly sat. The sun was almost at the horizon, but it was still
bright out, still hot. That was how it was here, Amy knew: there was no
transition between day and night, no gentle easing into evening. The
sun rose almost immediately into a noontime intensity, which it
didn't relinquish until the moment it touched the
sky's western edge. And then you could count the day into
darkness—that was how fast night came on. The only lamp they
had was the one with Eric, and it was low on oil. Fifteen minutes, she
guessed, and they'd be working blind.

 "Okay
with what?" she asked.

 "You'll
be the one to go down," Jeff said.

 "Down?"

 "Into
the shaft."

 Amy
just stared at him; she was too startled to speak. He'd taken
one of the archaeologists' shirts to replace the T-shirt
he'd thrown down to Eric, and it looked odd on him, making
him seem almost like another person. The shirt had a sheen to
it—it was meant to pass for khaki, but it didn't;
it was some sort of polyester, with buttons down the front and large
pockets on each side of the chest. It looked like something a hunter
might wear on safari, Amy thought. Or a photographer, maybe, with rolls
of film jammed into those peculiar pockets. Or a soldier, perhaps.
Somehow it made Jeff seem older—larger, even. His nose was
pink and peeling, and though he looked tired and sun-worn, there was a
jittery quality to him, an aura of heightened alertness.

 "Mathias
and I have to turn the crank," he said. "So
it's either you or Stacy. And Stacy, you
know…" He trailed off, shrugged. "It
just seems like you should be the one."

 Still
Amy was silent. She didn't want to go, of course, was
terrified of the idea, of dropping into the earth, into the darkness.
She hadn't even wanted to come here—that was what
she wanted to say to Jeff. If it had been up to her, they never
would've left the beach in the first place. And then, when
they'd discovered the hidden path, she'd tried to
warn him, hadn't she? She'd tried to tell him that
they shouldn't take it, and he'd refused to listen.
This was all his fault, then, wasn't it? So
shouldn't he be the one to descend into that hole? But even
as she was asking herself these questions, Amy was remembering what had
happened at the base of the hill, how she'd retreated across
the clearing, peering through her camera's viewfinder, her
foot slipping into the tangle of vines. If she hadn't done
that, maybe the Mayans wouldn't have forced them up the hill.
They wouldn't be here now—Pablo wouldn't
be lying at the bottom of the shaft with a broken back;
Eric's shoe wouldn't be full of blood.
They'd be walking somewhere miles from this place, every step
carrying them farther away, all six of them imagining that the
mosquitoes and the tiny black flies and the blisters forming on their
feet were things perfectly worthy of complaint.

 "You
were a lifeguard, weren't you?" Jeff asked. "You ought to know how to handle this sort of
thing."

 A
lifeguard. It was true, too, in a way. Amy had spent a summer working
at a pool in an apartment complex in her hometown. A tiny oval pool,
with a seven-foot deep end, no diving allowed. She'd sat in a
lawn chair, sunning herself from ten until six, five days a week,
warning children not to run, not to splash or dunk one another, and
telling the adults that they weren't supposed to bring
alcohol into the pool area. Both groups largely ignored her. It was a
small complex, teetering on the edge of solvency, full of her
town's downwardly mobile—drinkers and
divorcées—a depressing place. There
weren't that many children, and on some days no one came to
the pool at all. Amy would sit in her chair, reading. If it was
especially quiet, she'd often slip into the shallow end and
float there on her back, her mind going empty. She'd had to
take a lifesaving class, of course, before she was hired. And there
must've been a lesson about spinal injuries, how to secure
someone on a backboard. But, if so, she retained no memory of it.

 "You'll
use our belts," Jeff said.

 What
Amy wanted to do was run down the hill. She had an image of herself
attempting this, bursting into the clearing, confronting the men
waiting there. She'd tell them what had happened, find a way
to communicate everything that had gone so wrong here, miming it out
for them. It would be difficult, of course, but somehow she'd
get them to see her fear, to make them feel it, too. And
they'd relent. They'd get help. They'd
let them all depart. Mathias's brother was lying on the
opposite side of the hill, his corpse pierced with arrows, but still
Amy managed, for a brief instant, to believe in this fantasy. She
didn't want to be the one who was lowered into the shaft.

 Jeff
took her hand. He was opening his mouth to say something—to
convince her, she knew, or tell her that she didn't have a
choice—when the chirping resumed from the bottom of the hole.

 Everyone
but Mathias ran to the shaft, peered into it. Mathias was nearly
finished braiding, and he kept at it, not even pausing.

 "Eric?"
Jeff yelled. "Can you find it?"

 Eric
didn't answer for a moment. They could sense him stirring
down there, searching for the source of the sound. "It keeps
moving," he called. "Sometimes it seems like
it's to my left. And then it's to my
right."

 "Shouldn't
it light up as it rings?" Amy asked Jeff, her voice low,
almost a whisper.

 Jeff
shouted, "Is there a light? Look for a light."

 Again,
they could sense Eric moving about. "I don't see
it," he called. And then, a second later, just as they were
realizing this for themselves: "It's
stopped."

 They
all waited to see if the sound would start again, but it
didn't. The sun touched the western horizon and everything
took on a reddish hue. In a few minutes, it would be dark. Mathias was
done with his braiding. They watched him join this final section to the
others, then attach their makeshift backboard to the two dangling
strands. He finished just as the day began its sudden descent into
night. Then Jeff held the crank while Mathias and Stacy lifted the
backboard out over the shaft's mouth. They spent a moment
staring at it as it dangled there: Mathias had covered the aluminum
frame with one of the archaeologists' sleeping bags,
cushioning it. They piled all four of their belts on top of the
sleeping bag. Amy knew that though she hadn't yet agreed to
Jeff's proposition, the question had somehow been decided.
Everything was ready, and they thought she was, too. Mathias joined
Jeff beside the windlass, taking hold of its crank. Stacy stood there,
hugging herself, watching.

 "Just
climb on it," Jeff said.

 So
that was what Amy did. Girding herself, thinking brave thoughts, she
stepped out into the shaft's opening, crouching on the
aluminum frame, clutching at the braided strands of nylon. The
backboard creaked beneath her weight, rocking back and forth, but it
held. And then—before Amy even had a chance to collect
herself, or begin to second-guess her decision—the windlass
started to turn, dropping her from the day's gathering
darkness into the deeper darkness of the hole.

I
t had taken them a long time,
but now, finally, they were coming. Eric didn't know how
long, exactly, it had been, perhaps not quite as long as it had seemed,
but a long time nonetheless. Even under the best of circumstances, he
wasn't very good at reckoning the passage of
time—he lacked an internal clock—but here in the
hole, in the darkness, under the stress of everything that had happened
thus far today, it was far more difficult than usual. All he knew was
that it was becoming night up there, that the blue rectangle of sky had
taken on a brief blush of red before fading into a blue-gray, a slate
gray, a gray-black. They'd made a backboard and Amy was
crouched on it now, dropping toward him.

 Hours,
Eric supposed. It must've been hours. Pablo had been
screaming and then he'd stopped, and Stacy had shouted down
to him, and they'd talked back and forth, and Jeff had told
him to blow out the lamp. Then they'd all vanished to make
the backboard and lengthen the rope—it had taken them a long
time, too long—and he'd first crouched, then sat
beside Pablo, gripping his wrist all the while. Talking, too, off and
on, to keep the Greek company, to raise his spirits and try to trick
him—trick both of them, maybe—into believing that
everything was going to be all right.

 But
everything wasn't going to be all right, of course, and no
matter how hard Eric worked to throw a tone of optimism into his
voice—and he did work; he consciously struggled for it, an
echo of the Greeks' playful bantering among
themselves—he couldn't elude this difficult fact.
There was the smell, for one thing. The smell of shit—of
urine, too. Pablo had broken his back, lost control of his bowels, his
bladder. He'd need to have a catheter put in, a bag hanging
from the side of his bed, nurses to empty it and keep him clean.
He'd need surgery, and quickly—right now, earlier
than now—he'd need doctors and physical therapists
hovering about him, charting his progress. And Eric couldn't
see how any of this was going to happen. They'd worked all
afternoon to build a backboard and with it they were finally going to
get him out of this hole, but what would that accomplish? Out of the
hole, up there among the tents and the flowering vines, his back would
still be broken, his bladder and bowels leaking urine and shit into his
already-sodden pants. And there was nothing they could do about it.

 Eric's
knee had stopped bleeding finally. There was a steady, throbbing ache,
which jumped in volume whenever he shifted his weight. Jeff's
T-shirt was stiff with dried blood; Eric set it on the ground beside
him. His shoe still felt damp.

 Eric
told Pablo how people healed—implacably—how the
worst part was the accident itself, then the body went to work,
mobilizing, rebuilding. Even now, even as they were talking, it was
beginning to happen. He told Pablo about the bones he'd
broken as a child. He described falling on a wet sidewalk and cracking
his forearm—he couldn't remember which bone, the
radius, maybe, or the ulna; it didn't matter. He'd
had a cast for six weeks, the end of the summer; he could remember the
stink of it when they cut it off, sweat and mildew, his arm looking
pale and too thin, his terror of the whirling saw. He'd
broken his collarbone playing Superman, flying headfirst down a
playground slide. He'd broken his nose falling off a pogo
stick. And he described all of these accidents for Pablo now, in
detail, the pain of each one, the course of his eventual recovery: his
implacable, inevitable recovery.

 Pablo
couldn't understand a single word of this, of course. He
moaned and muttered. Occasionally, he'd lift the arm Eric
wasn't holding and seem to reach for something at his side,
though Eric couldn't guess what, since there was nothing
there but darkness. Eric ignored this movement—the moaning
and muttering, too—he just kept talking, working at it, his
voice high and falsely cheerful. He couldn't think of
anything else to do.

 He
told Pablo of other accidents he'd witnessed: a boy
who'd skate-boarded into traffic (a concussion and a handful
of broken ribs), a neighbor who'd tumbled off his roof while
cleaning out the gutters (a dislocated shoulder, a pair of broken
fingers), a girl who'd mistimed her jump from a rope swing,
landing not in the river, as intended, but upon its rocky bank (a
shattered ankle, three lost teeth). He talked about the town where
he'd been raised, how small it was, how ugly and provincial,
yet somehow picturesque in its ugliness, somehow worldly in its
provincialism. When a siren sounded, people went to their front doors,
stepped out onto their porches, shaded their eyes to see. Children
jumped on bicycles, raced after the ambulance or fire truck or police
car. There was gawking involved, of course, but also empathy. When Eric
had broken his arm, neighbors had come calling, bearing gifts: comic
books for him to read, videos to watch.

 He
kept hold of Pablo's wrist with his right hand while he
talked, squeezing sometimes to emphasize certain points, never letting
go. His left hand moved back and forth between the oil lamp and the box
of matches, touching one and then the other in a continuous, restless
circuit, moving lightly across them, as if they were beads on a rosary.
And there was something prayerful about the gesture, too; it was
accompanied by a pair of words in his head. Yet, even as he told his
tales to Pablo in his confident, assertively optimistic voice, he was
silently repeating the two words, chanting them internally while his
hand shifted from lamp to matches to lamp to
matches:
Still
there, still there, still there, still there…

 He
described for Pablo what it had felt like to ride his bicycle in
pursuit of the sirens, the flashing lights. The
excitement—that giddy feeling of drama and disaster. He told
him of happy endings. Of seven-year-old Mary Kelly, who knew how to
climb a tree but not how to get down, her fear making her scramble
higher and higher, crying as she went, pulling her tiny body upward,
forty feet, into the very crown of an ancient oak, a crowd gathering
beneath her, calling to her, urging her back down, while a wind came
up, gradually increasing, making the branches sway, the entire tree
seeming to dip and rise. He imitated for Pablo the collective gasp when
she almost slipped, dangling for an excruciatingly long string of
seconds before she managed to regain her foothold, crying all the
while, the sirens approaching, the boys on their bicycles. Then the
fire truck with its ladder slowly angling skyward, the cheers when the
paramedic leaned deep into the foliage, grasped the little girl by her
arm, yanked her toward him, throwing her over his shoulder.