The Ruins (16 page)

 Eric
had the sudden sense, in the darkness, of a hand touching the small of
his back. He jumped, almost yelped, but caught himself. It was just the
vine. Somehow, it had managed to take root down here, too, at the
bottom of the shaft. He must've leaned into it as he talked,
creating the impression of its having reached out and touched him,
cradling him at the base of his spine, almost caressing him. It was
impossible to keep his bearings here; he was as good as blind. All he
had to orient himself was Pablo's wrist and—
still
there, still there, still there
—the oil lamp and
the box of matches. He slid forward to escape the vine's
touch—it was creepy, and it made him shiver; he
didn't like it—shifting until he was right up
against Pablo's broken body. When he moved, there was a
sharp, tearing pain from the cut in his knee, and it started to bleed
again. He patted at the ground, searching for Jeff's T-shirt,
then pressed it once more to the wound.

 He
circled back to the girl on the rope swing; Marci Brand, thirteen years
old. She'd had braces and a long brown ponytail. He told
Pablo how they'd all laughed at first, seeing her fall, he
and the other children. There'd been something comical about
it,
cartoonlike
.
They'd watched her drop, heard that awful slapping sound as
she hit the rocks; everyone must've known she was hurt. But
they'd laughed, all of them, as if to deny this, to undo it,
stopping only when they saw her try to stand, then crumple awkwardly,
falling onto her side and sliding down the rocky bank into the water.
Her mouth was cut—she'd hit her face against the
stones—and a murky cloud of blood slowly formed around her in
the water as she floated there, thrashing her arms. Her eyes were
clenched shut, Eric remembered, her expression contorted. She was
grimacing, but not crying; she didn't make a sound, not even
when they pulled her out, dragging her back up onto the bank while one
of them rode off on his bicycle to get help. Later, they all felt
guilty about having laughed, especially when it looked as if she might
not be able to walk again. But she did, eventually—
implacably,
inexorably
—with a slight limp, perhaps, although
this was barely noticeable, not noticeable at all, really, unless you
knew the story, unless you were watching for it.

 Now
and then, Eric thought he could see things in the
darkness—floating shapes,
balloonlike
,
faintly luminescent. They seemed to approach, then hover right in front
of him before slowly withdrawing again. Some had a bluish green tint;
others were a faint yellow, almost white. These were tricks his eyes
were playing on him, he knew, physiological reactions to the darkness,
but he couldn't help himself: whenever they appeared to come
especially close, he'd relinquish his grip on
Pablo's wrist so that he could try to touch them. As soon as
he'd lift his hand, though, the shapes would vanish, only to
reappear at some new spot, farther away, and resume their slow, gently
bobbing approach. He took the T-shirt away from his cut knee. The wound
had stopped bleeding again. Immediately, he reached for the lamp, the
matches:
still
there, still there
….

 He
told Pablo other stories, too, tales that hadn't ended so
happily—
implacably, inexorably
—changing
them for the wounded man's benefit. Little
Stevie
Stahl, who was swept into
a storm sewer while playing in a flooded field, was no longer
discovered by a volunteer scuba diver, half-buried in silt, bloated
beyond recognition. No: he reappeared five minutes later and almost a
mile away, spit out into the river, cut and bruised and crying, it was
true, but otherwise, miraculously, unharmed. And Ginger
Ruby—who'd set her uncle's garage on fire
while playing with a book of matches, and then, disoriented by the
smoke and her rising panic, fled away from the door through which she
could've easily escaped, and died crouching against the back
wall, behind a row of garbage cans—was, in Eric's
retelling of the story, saved by a fireman, brought out to the cheers
of the gathered crowd, gasping and coughing and covered with soot, her
shirt and hair scorched, but otherwise (
yes,
miraculously
) unharmed.

 The
cold air coming from the open shaft on the far side of
Pablo's body wasn't constant. Sometimes it would
stop, seem to hold its breath, and the temperature in the hole would
instantly begin to rise. Eric would start to sweat, his shirt growing
damp with it, and then, abruptly, the cold air would return. This
constant fluctuation unsettled Eric, frightened him, made the darkness
within the shaft seem threateningly animate. Each time the draft
paused, he felt as if it had been blocked by someone—or
something—a presence that was hesitating just in front of
him, examining and appraising him. Once, he even thought he heard it
sniffing, taking in his scent. His senses were playing tricks again, he
knew. But still, he had to resist the urge to light the lamp, his hand
pausing, wavering, then resuming its steady back and
forth:
still
there, still there, still there
.

 He
told Pablo of his friend Gary Holmes, who'd dreamed of
becoming a pilot. Gary had badgered and cajoled and begged his parents,
wearing them down year by year, until they finally gave him flying
lessons for his sixteenth birthday. Every Saturday, he'd ride
his bicycle out to the local airport and spend the afternoon there,
entering this new world. Three months into it, Eric was playing
soccer—a youth league, four separate games going on at once,
the fields lying parallel to one another. A small plane flew over, very
low, buzzing them, the players pausing for a reflexive instant as the
aircraft's shadow swept across them, everyone ducking
involuntarily, then peering upward. The plane flew on, banked, made
another pass, the games stuttering to a more complete halt. The
referees blew their whistles; they were waving their arms, struggling
to restore order, when the plane banked a second time, its engine
stuttering, coughing, falling silent. And then—a handful of
seconds later, the time it takes to breathe, exhale, breathe
again—from somewhere within the wooded area west of the
fields came the slamming, splintering, crunching sound of the crash.
Not in the version Eric shared with Pablo, though. No, as Eric told the
story, someone had understood what was happening on that very first low
pass. One of the coaches, then another. They began to shout, pointing,
the referees joining in with their whistles, everyone yelling suddenly,
running. The plane was in distress; it was attempting an emergency
landing. They needed to clear the fields. And they did it. By the time
the plane had banked, returned for its second pass, everyone was
crowded back against the sidelines. The plane landed roughly, bouncing,
crashing through one of the wooden goals, its front wheels digging into
the soft earth, nearly flipping it, so that it finally came to rest
tipped forward on its nose, its propeller bent, its windshield cracked.
Eric hesitated for a moment here, struggling to imagine what Gary and
his instructor's injuries might've been, how that
plane's abrupt return to earth would've battered
the two bodies in its cockpit. A shattered kneecap, he decided. A
dislocated shoulder, a cracked pelvis, a mild concussion. He waved
these aside even as he listed them. They all healed, he assured Pablo,
as such injuries always do—yes, once again—
implacably,
inexorably
.

 The
others were busy up above, braiding the strips of nylon
they'd cut from the blue tent, building their backboard; they
didn't have time to think. But Eric was down here in the
dark, with the smell of Pablo's shit and urine, the rising
and falling of his moans, his muttering. So it was probably natural
that he was the first of them to begin to wonder if the Greek might not
survive this adventure, if his body had moved beyond the realm
of
implacable
and
inexorable
,
if he was, after all, going to die in the coming
hours or days while they hovered helplessly about him.

 It
seemed as if Pablo might've fallen asleep—or lost
consciousness. He'd stopped muttering, anyway, stopped
moaning, stopped reaching out into the darkness for whatever it was
that he imagined to be waiting there for him to grasp. Eric fell
silent, too, sat beside Pablo, holding his wrist with one hand,
touching the lamp, the matches with the other. Time seemed to pass even
more slowly without the sound of his voice echoing back at him from the
shaft's narrow walls. His thoughts returned to Gary Holmes,
to the photograph of the mangled plane on the front page of the local
paper, the memorial service in the high school auditorium.

 Gary
had been a friend of his—not a close one, but more than an
acquaintance, and, a month after the funeral, Gary's mother
had stopped by Eric's house. "Eric?" his
own mother had called. "There's someone here to see
you."

 Eric
had hurried downstairs, to find Mrs. Holmes standing in the front hall.
She'd come to ask if he wanted Gary's bicycle. It
was an odd, awkward encounter; Eric's mother had stood there
watching them talk, looking tearful. She kept reaching out to touch
Mrs. Holmes's shoulder. Eric had felt startled by the
request, and strangely embarrassed—after all, he
hadn't been that close to Gary. He tried to decline the
offer, only to change his mind when he saw how stricken Mrs. Holmes
looked at the first, hesitant shake of his head. Yes, he said. Of
course he'd take the bike. He thanked her, and then his
mother was crying in earnest. So was Mrs. Holmes.

 The
bicycle was still at the airport, locked to the chain-link fence where
Gary had left it that final day. Eric's father dropped him
off there early one morning, on his way to work, and Eric claimed the
bike, hunching over it with the slip of paper Mrs. Holmes had given
him, squinting to decipher her handwriting, the three numbers for the
combination lock. He had to try it a half dozen times before it worked,
and then he rode off, straight to school, a fifteen-mile trip, arriving
a few minutes late, the first bell having already rung, the halls
silent and empty. The bicycle's seat had been too high for
him, making it difficult to pedal; the chain needed oil; the rims were
rusting from having sat out in the weather for the past month. It
wasn't a thing to feel proud of, and he already had his own
bike anyway—perhaps it was this, or else simply that he was
late, but he didn't lock the bicycle when he arrived at
school; he tossed it down against the rack and hurried inside. He left
it there that night, too, still unlocked, taking the bus home instead.
And in the morning, it was gone.

 There
was that pressure against Eric's back once more, a hand
touching him. He felt his heart jump in his chest even as he struggled
to reassure himself. It was just the vine. He must've
slouched back into it again. He shifted toward Pablo, only to realize
that he was already as close to the Greek as he could get. The vine had
moved somehow, crept toward him, drawn by his warmth, perhaps. It made
him uneasy, a little scared, to think of the vine like
this—something volitional, almost sentient—it made
him want to flee the hole altogether. He thought about shouting upward,
calling to the others, but he stopped himself at the last instant,
worried that he'd wake Pablo from his sleep.

 Gary's
mother had gone from house to house, passing on her son's
possessions to boys who didn't know what to do with them.
Boys who lost her son's sweaters and jackets, his baseball
mitt and swim goggles, who gave them away or discarded them outright,
who buried them in closets and trunks and basements. This was the way
death always worked, Eric supposed; the living did everything possible
to sweep all evidence of it from sight. Even Gary's closest
friends continued forward with their lives, unmarred in any significant
way by his absence, climbing from grade to grade, then leaping off into
college, forgetting him as they went, remembering instead that
photograph of the crumpled plane, the abrupt silence on the soccer
fields before its crash.

 Eric
had to pee. But he was afraid to stand up and step toward the wall of
the shaft to do this, irrationally frightened that the Greek or the
lamp or the matches would no longer be there when he returned. He
unbuckled his belt to ease the pressure on his bladder, tried to
distract himself with word games, making up a vocabulary test for his
future students, beginning with
the
A
's, ten words, a little quiz to start the week, five points
for the definitions, five for the spelling.

 
Albatross,
he
thought.
Avarice
. Annunciation. Alacrity. Armament. Adjacent. Arduous.
Accentuate. Accommodate. Allegation
.

 He
was just turning to
the
B
's—
Boisterous. Bravado. Bandoleer. Botanist
—when
that electronic chirping began again, waking Pablo, startling them
both. Eric let go of the Greek's wrist, stood up, the wound
on his knee making him stagger-step, like a clubfoot. The chirping
seemed to be coming from his right, yet when he limped toward it, he
realized he was wrong. It was coming from behind him now. He started to
turn, but then wasn't so certain. It seemed to be circling
him, drifting along the walls of the shaft.

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

 Eric
craned his head back. He could see them leaning into the rectangle of
blue sky. He called up, told them how it was moving on him, first in
one direction, then another.

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