Well in Time (13 page)

Scenes from his life began to flash through his mind. There was the time in Vietnam, when he was just new to the journalistic profession, when he went into the field with a Marine recon unit and they were hit with enemy fire. Flashes of gunfire erupted in his brain and he saw the jungle floor again as he dove toward it, heard the shouts of the men, and smelled, just as vividly as if it were flowing from his own body in present time, the metallic smell of blood.

Just as quickly, he was in Ethiopia with his Land Rover’s axle broken in a ditch and the ground temperature soaring past a hundred and twenty degrees. He was swigging the last drop of water from his canteen, when a ragtag group of local militia hove into view, Kalashnikov rifles bristling from the beds of a couple of battered Toyota pickups. He could feel, again, the steely, simian grip of those hands that pulled him into the truck, smell the reek of unwashed flesh, and hear the excited jabber of his captors.

Again, his mind skittered and he was in the cockpit of a bomber as it swooped low over a thatched village in the jungle. Mozambique! The CIA’s covert operation against the rebels there. The plane dove, strafed, took fire. Bullets ripped through the floor right next to his boot. The pilot’s feet both spouted blood, as he slumped on the stick and the plane slid crazily sideways.

Hill could not stop the progression of wild memories, nor quell the intensity of the visceral sensations they brought. His mind was fevered and he felt as if his skull might break open like a melon, spilling his brains into the sand. He lost all sense of where he was in time and space and felt himself spinning into oblivion.

§

Calypso slithered desperately forward, keeping her head tilted sideways beneath the crushing ceiling. Her elbows barked against the rough stone of the tube. She was in the lowest place, the one that always made her feel, no matter how many times she passed through it, as if her death were imminent. Only the thought of the freedom of movement that awaited her kept her from panic.
Just a few more yards to go
, she told herself.
You can do it! You can do it!

Turning her head sideways, she slipped her skull under what she knew was the very tightest place of all. She dug her hands into the sand and swiveled her hips, worming her way through the obstructed passage. Just a couple of yards now. Then a few feet. Finally, her head broke through to open space, then her arms, and she was able to pull herself forward into the next cavern.

Just as she was pulling her legs from the tube, she heard it. The sound was muffled, but that did nothing to stifle the horror of it. It was so anguished, so tormented, that it turned her stomach.

Hill! The sheer abandon of the shriek was telling. He was losing it. Tears leapt to her eyes. “My God!” she gasped. “That poor man!”

She experienced an instant of pure revulsion at the thought of going back into the tube, then she unsnapped her pack from its tether and kicked it to the side. Diving onto the cavern floor, she lunged forward and, denying herself the right of protest, wriggled back into the tube.

§

When Hill came back to himself, his first sensation was of a cool breeze blowing onto his fevered face. He lay with his eyes closed and savored the freshness of the air, the sweetness of the scent of pine. He rolled his head to the side and glanced upward. A rend in the stone ceiling revealed a silvery night sky luminous with stars. Directly above him, the thin sickle of a new moon rode the river of the Milky Way like a slender boat.

“Just push with your feet, Walter,” he heard Calypso’s voice say calmly. It echoed slightly, like a voice from another dimension. “Be like water. Wiggle your hips like a fish. Paddle with your feet. Keep your head turned to the side so it will slip through. You’re almost there. Just let yourself swim through.”

Her voice calmed him. He smiled up at the moon as he pushed his feet into the sand. The sensation of floating was marvelous. He wiggled his hips and moved forward. He felt the stone above him brush his cheek, then scrape across his shoulders and back, but he was oblivious, reassured by the sight of Calypso, standing free against the night sky. She bent her kind face toward him and smiled. Her hair wreathed on the night wind and her skirt arced and ruffled about her. “Just swim, Walter,” she said again. Gently, he wafted forward like a fish in dark water, drifting in the moonlight.

§

Hill lay on the rough floor of the cavern in fetal posture, his breathing coming in ragged gulps. The strange sensation of floating still bore him on illusory waters.

“It’s over, Walter. You made it. It’s all over now,” Calypso’s voice crooned.

Her hand on his shoulder gently rocked him. That was his first realization that he was sobbing. He registered this with distant amazement, while the fact-finding and -keeping part of his brain informed him that he had not cried since he was nine and broke his arm playing touch football. There must be a good deal pent up, given the intervening decades, his rational mind reasoned distantly.

While this internal dialogue proceeded and the sobbing continued unabated, some new and fresh place in his psyche was bathed in a delicious sense of peace and wellbeing. He lay beneath the confusion of voices like a big trout in the calm space beneath turbulent water. He felt absolved of every sin, shriven of all burdens, as innocent and vulnerable as a newborn babe.

Finally, Calypso was able to get him to his feet and, supporting his hobbling, half-delusional stagger, she guided him a short distance into a side room off the main cavern, where she leaned him against the wall while she lit a lantern. Hill promptly slid down into a heap and lay crooning and chuckling to himself, as Calypso went about setting up camp from the stored supplies. She lit a camp stove and put water on to boil, rolled out self-inflating mattresses, and spread sleeping bags on top. She brewed two tin cups of tea and handed one to Hill, who had propped himself against the wall and was now staring blankly at the shadows jiggling and dancing over the stone walls.

“What is this place?” His voice surprised her with its youthful lilt. The question might have been asked by a curious ten-year-old.

“After that horrible tube, Javier and I both felt we needed to provide some comfort for ourselves, so we prepared this room. We liked it because it’s about the size of our bedroom at home.” She smiled and glanced at the ceiling that stood a good four feet above her head. “Plenty of breathing space.”

“And how far are we from getting out of this place?”

“When we get up from sleeping, it will basically be a stroll and then we’ll be outside under the sky.”

Hill accepted the bowl of soup she handed him and tilted it eagerly to his lips. “I’m starving! How long has it been since we ate?”

“You’re the one with the wristwatch.”

Hill pulled back his cuff and squinted at his watch, did a double take, and stared at it in amazement. “It’s after eight o’clock! But it was almost nine, when we were having breakfast, so that means…But it can’t be. Can it? Have we really been in this cave almost twelve hours?”

Calypso smiled at him with mischief sparkling in her eyes.

“Twelve hours you think, huh?” She laughed. “Walter, it takes a full day to get through this cave. We’ve been spelunking for almost twenty-four hours!”

“You’re kidding.” His voice was deadpan.

“No, Walter. I’m completely serious. If you feel exhausted, now you know why.”

“I had no idea…”

“You lose all track of time in a cave, without natural light.” She collected his cup and refilled it with soup. “There’s really no way to anticipate whether it will be light or dark when we come out. I’m always surprised.” They drank their soup in silence while Hill contemplated this.

When they had drunk all the soup, Calypso rummaged in her pack, came up with two oranges and handed one to Hill.

“Dessert.”

“Every adventure I go on with you, I end up losing weight. It beats regular attendance at the gym.” Even Hill’s thumbs felt tired, as he peeled the orange. “After this, I’m going to need to lie down.”

“Me, too.” Calypso gathered their cups, scoured them with sand, and rinsed them in a meager stream of bottled water, then stored them again in the metal hamper.

“How’d you get that big thing through the tube?”

Calypso smiled. “We brought it in from this side. You think we’re crazy enough to try to wrestle it through there?”

“Crazy is what I think this entire place and your lifestyle in it is,” Hill muttered. He rolled onto his knees and crawled to the nearest sleeping bag. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all. I’m right behind you.” She switched on her headlamp, blew out the lantern, and came to sit on the bag next to Hill’s, busying herself untying her shoes and flexing her feet. “Oh but it feels good to get those off!”

In answer, there was only Hill’s soft breathing. Calypso dragged her pack over to serve as a pillow, crawled into her bag, and zipped herself in. When she turned off her light, the blackness that engulfed her was already part of her dreams.

Then softly, through the fog of sleep, she heard Hill’s whisper:

“You were wearing a skirt.”

“Um?”

“A skirt. Why did you pack a skirt?”

Calypso did, in fact, have a skirt at the bottom of her pack along with her lipstick, but she had not worn either.

“You’re dreaming, Walter.”

“No.” She heard him shift onto his side, facing her. “I’m not dreaming. I saw you, standing in that opening in the rock. The wind was blowing your skirt.”

“What opening in the rock?”

“The one right above the tightest part of the tube. If it hadn’t been for that—the sight of the stars, the fresh air flooding in, and you standing there talking to me—I think I would have lost my mind. You saved my life. Thank you.”

Calypso opened her eyes to the limitless blackness and stared. Memories of her own initiation into alternate consciousness filled her: Santa Rita prison, the steely grip of the guard’s hands, the rape, the overwhelming of her natural boundaries, the pinioning of her innate strength. And then the euphoria afterwards: the strength derived from having survived, the sense of expansion, of floating, of becoming one with all that is.

Finally, she sighed and murmured, “You’re entirely welcome, Walter. Now, go to sleep.”

§

After the explosions and the firing of the howitzer, the battle raged on. Men advanced on the ground, only to be mown down by Javier’s gunners on the wall, who fought tenaciously, reloading and firing with trained rapidity and accuracy. The snipers managed to keep anyone from firing the howitzer again. Another of Pedro’s traps erupted from under the roadbed, lifting trucks and SUVs into the air, exploding them.

All the while, Javier’s home was burning. The heat of it became intense, then almost unbearable, for the men on the walls but they would not be dislodged. Scorched and exhausted, they kept cramming fresh clips into their rifles and firing, until there was no one left to kill.

A sudden, eerie silence fell. The only sound was the crackling of flames as they consumed the house. By the time the men were free to fight the fire, there was nothing left to save.

Calypso awoke to pitch blackness and at first, in panic, could not remember where she was, although she knew that wherever it was, she was with Hill. He must be having the same sensation, because she could hear him scrabbling for the switch on his headlamp. With a click, sudden illumination revealed the folded and veined wall and ceiling of the cave and remembrance flooded her.

“Good morning, Walter,” she muttered, still half asleep.

“Good morning to you! Just stay put. I’ll get the tea water going.” Hill pushed from the ground and rummaged for a match, then lit the camp lantern and stove. Calypso squeezed her eyes shut and turned on her side, away from the light.

“Still tired?”

“Um-hum.”

“Some of this glue that passes for instant oatmeal ought to fix you right up.” He ripped open a foil pouch, sounding positively chirrupy.

Calypso sat up, her hair wrapped about her shoulders like a shawl, and observed Hill more closely.

“My, we’re a merry little ball of sunshine this morning.”

“Never felt better in my life.” He began to whistle and the beam of his headlamp zigzagged about the space in time. “
When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along…
” he sang softly, as if his whistle were still accompanying him. “
Dee dum, dee dum, dee dum da dum…cheer up, cheer up the sun is red. Live, love, laugh, and be happy-y-y-y-y…
” The final words were sung in full-throttle bass, his arms spread wide.

Calypso turned on her stomach and pulled her pack over her head.

§

Two hours later, the gloom of the cave began to brighten to twilight as they clambered up a final bouldered incline and saw sky glimmering within the black template of the cave’s mouth. By Hill’s watch, it was close to six o’clock, but neither could say with assurance if it was six in the morning or six at night.

“It’s like being on one of those transpacific flights where you cross the international dateline and you don’t know even what day it is, let alone what time,” Hill said, pulling himself up the final incline. He stuck his head out of the cave and peered around like a groundhog assessing the weather. “The sun seems to be over there, behind a mountain,” he reported, pointing to his left as he clambered out into the light.

“That’s west, so it’s evening.” Calypso stepped from the cave, shrugged off her pack and dropped it on the ground. They were standing at the base of a cliff soaring into an ultramarine sky that, to her cave-weary eyes, sparked electrically in the slanting rays of the sun. Before them was a steep downhill slope of tumbled boulders and low, scruffy brush.

“We’ve dropped almost a mile in elevation,” she said, glancing at Hill, who also seemed bedazzled by the sight of the sky. “That’s the Batopilas River just below us. It’s probably only a mile away.”

“I thought it was the Urique.”

“No, we’ve moved right through the mountain, from one river drainage to another.”

“Amazing! Where to now, fearless leader?”

“There’s an old mule trail that follows the river. It was built in the seventeenth century to bring supplies to the mines and to bring the bullion out. We’ll follow that into Batopilas. We keep a safe house there.”

“Is it far?”

Calypso picked up her pack and slung it over her shoulder. “Far enough. We won’t come close to getting there before dark.”

She began to pick her way down the slope toward the river. Hill started after her and then turned back, leaning his shoulders into the opening of the cave.

“Thank you,” he called. He didn’t know why he was doing it or to whom he was addressing his gratitude, but somewhere deep within him, he knew it was the right thing to do.

§

The western sky, clasped between twin prongs of cliffs, began to flame with radiant crimson and gold, and deep indigo shadows nested in the swales of the canyon. Calypso led the way down a steep scree slope made more difficult by the falling light.

“We can’t make Batopilas tonight,” she called back to Hill, who was lowering himself gingerly through a notch between two car-sized boulders. “It’s just too treacherous. We don’t need a broken leg to add to our woes.”

“I agree.” Hill’s legs were shaking with exhaustion and his entire body ached from the exertion in the cave. “Is there somewhere we could hole up for the night?” They were out of water and his words clicked off a dry tongue.

“There’s a spring up ahead.” Calypso’s voice was pinched with fatigue. “We’ll stop there for the night.”

A quarter hour of carefully lowering themselves down the treacherous slope brought them to a game trail beaten faintly into the loose gravel.

“We have to head back uphill a little,” Calypso said, pointing up the trail. “It’s not far.” Hill only nodded, then followed as Calypso turned right onto the trail.

A few more minutes of scrabbling uphill and they pulled themselves onto a tiny plateau. An extension of the cliff, like the flounce of a lady’s skirt hem, backed the flat space and from within the ruffled rocks came a delicious sound.

Rounding the edge of the outcrop, they came on a scene of astonishing beauty. The base of the rocks formed a shallow grotto, covered floor, walls and ceiling, with moss and hanging ferns. Water eddied down the back wall into a shallow pool that shown in last light like a silver shield. At the back of the pool, beside the falling water, was a figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe carved from the living stone, daubed with ochre and cloaked in shadow.

They dropped their packs and rummaged for their water bottles. Calypso entered the grotto first and knelt on the lip of the pool.

“There are animal tracks here,” she said. “Deer and raccoon.” She cast her eyes along the bank as she held her bottle submerged in the cool water. “And something else. . .” she frowned and bent to squint at the muddy border. “Sometime bigger. Maybe a large dog or a cougar. It’s hard to tell. The prints are all muddled.”

She pushed to her feet and backed out of the grotto, inviting Hill into it with a sweep of her hand. Then she raised the bottle to her lips and swallowed the sweet, cold water gratefully, in long pulls until the container was empty, her head thrown back and her eyes on the first stars winking above the iron clamps of the cliffs.

§

“How did you find this place?”

They were lounging around a small brush wood fire. Above them, the moonless night sky was limpid with starlight. A cold wind tugged at their mylar space blankets and made the fire gutter and smoke. Calypso drew her blanket more tightly around her shoulders and stared into the fire, remembering.

“It was the first time we made it all the way through the cave. We’d been trying to find the passage for months. A
Rarámuri
shaman told us it was possible, but we’d only come to blind ends before.”

She turned her eyes toward Hill.

“You can imagine how we felt once we’d started into the tube. I was sure we were going to die in there. I only kept going because Javier was ahead of me and I didn’t want to get separated from him. And he says he only kept going because I was behind him and he didn’t want to make me back up!” She laughed, shaking her head.

“So when we finally staggered out, we were exhausted and ready to die from thirst. It was summer, too, and so hot! I don’t know what we would have done if
Suré
hadn’t appeared, like a miracle.”

“Suré?”

“A Rarámuri man. We just looked up and there he was, standing on a boulder. He led us here.”

Calypso could still see him in her mind’s eye, with his long, bronze runner’s legs, his breechcloth and sky blue cotton shirt with long, gathered sleeves, staring at them as if they were as startling to him as he was to them.

“
Kuira
,” Javier had said.
Hello
.

“
Kuira
,” the man responded, his voice almost a whisper, as was customary among his shy people.

“
Wawik
?” Javier asked hopefully.
Water?

The man shook his head. “
Ke
.”
No.

At the time, they had only been at Rancho Cielo for two years and were still learning the language of the local indigenous. His linguistic cache almost expended, Javier asked, “
Wawik
—
dónde?
” Apparently bilingual, the man had pointed downhill and beckoned for them to follow. In due course, he led them up the game trail to the spring in the grotto.

“Suré works for us now,” Calypso said. “He had to give up his native ways because the cartels wanted him to grow marijuana instead of corn. When he refused, they threatened to kill his family, so he had to leave his little farm.” She sighed. “It’s so unfair, Walter. You really ought to write an exposé. The Rarámuri are being pushed off their lands, just like the Mayans in Chiapas. It’s the story of modern Mexico.”

“Not so very modern. Remember, it started with the Conquest, in 1519. It’s not exactly hot news.” Hill tossed another stick on the fire and chafed his hands together. “I thought Mexico was supposed to be hot and tropical.”

“It’s autumn, Walter, and you’re two thousand feet up in the Sierra. But when we get to Batopilas, you’ll see that it’s tropical. Up on our plateau there are pine and fir, but down here in the canyon there are date palms and citrus trees.”

They sat in silence, listening to the night wind moaning through the cliffs and spires of the canyon and the nearer, more companionable crackle of the fire. “It must be all over by now at the ranch,” Calypso ventured at last. Her voice was small and tight with worry. “When we get to Batopilas I’ll call. Or maybe there will be news waiting for us. Or maybe even,” her voice brightened, “Javier.”

Hill sat wrapped in his mylar blanket and stared glumly into the fire. He didn’t want to think about what had happened at Rancho Cielo, and he definitely did not want to voice to Calypso the nagging concern that weighed on him as if he were carrying a set of barbells.

“Maybe so,” he replied. “Maybe so.”

§

The growling of their stomachs woke them long before dawn. The fire had burned down so that not even embers remained, but the cold wind that had gained in ferocity during the night had died with it. Despite the emergency blankets, they were both stiff, sore, and deeply chilled.

“Do you have any food left in your pack, Walter?” Calypso had pushed herself upright and was stacking tiny sticks in the blackened fire pit. “I’m all out.”

Hill sat up, dreading the next stage of ascension that would require him to rise to his feet.

“I’m out, too.”

Calypso lit the pyramid of sticks and sheltered them from the wind with her body until they flared into flame. She filled an aluminum bowl with water and set it on rocks near the flames.

“I still have some tea. When we’ve had that, I’ll see if I can find the ingredients for an energy drink the Rarámuri make. It fuels them to run day and night, sometimes for two hundred miles or more.”

“I feel like that, sometimes, when I’ve had my second espresso.”

“Yes, but do you
do
it?”

“What?”

“Run.”

He reached to a boulder, and with a grunt, pulled himself to his feet.

“I’ll be grateful if I can still walk.”

After tea, Calypso scouted the vegetation around the grotto.

“There’s a wild lime tree here and we’re in luck. It still has some fruit.” She came back to the fire with a handful of small, leathery green limes. “Now for some chia seeds.”

She followed the trickle of water that emanated from the grotto and crept darkly down through the rocks toward the river.

“Chia’s a member of the mint family,” she called back to him. “It grows wild along water courses here in the canyon. The seeds are very nutritious.”

Hill’s eyes followed as she picked her way through the rocks, bending to harvest seeds into her bowl from dry, wind-beaten seed head spires, and he marveled at her resilience. Despite the hell of the last two days, she looked fresh and beautiful, with her cheeks rouged by wind and her hair in a long braid over her shoulder. Her blue jeans were faded and abraded and she wore them, he reflected, as if she were on the street in Paris, with indefinable chic.

From his vantage point on the edge of the grotto plateau, the backdrop of canyon fell away behind her in shadowy shelves of indigo. She was so at home there, so comfortable in the wildness and chaos of it all, that Hill felt the old tug. He would never be free of it. For him, Calypso was the summation of womankind and rather than make him morose, this realization brightened his mind, like the sun that was just beginning to spill over the high cliffs to the east.

Here he was, in this impossibly feral place with the woman of his dreams, who was, in fact, a waking reality. In the sacred ceremony of life, he had just ingested the wafer, or the sliver of peyote, or the sacred mushroom. With the day’s dawning, his being flared like gates of light opening, allowing the holy moment to enter.

Even one instant of this pure and vivid life was worth all the rest, with its bills and sweltering airports, bad food, boring and officious people, and all the other accumulated ills of Western civilization. He would not trade this instant for all the rest of it put together. This, he knew in a flash of insight, was the purity of love and he rejoiced in it.

§

Calypso came to the fire, her face glowing from the climb back to the plateau, and set down the bowl with it’s small clutch of mottled gray and tan seeds. Then she went to the cliff face and bent toward the riffles of water-worn rock as if searching for something.

“It’s still here!” she said and held up a round, fist-sized stone in triumph. “I’ve used this every time we’ve come here,” she said over her shoulder, as she washed the rock in the pool.

Settling cross-legged by the fire, she set the aluminum bowl with the harvested chia seeds in her lap, then tore open two small pouches of honey from her pack and dribbled the amber runnels over the seeds. Finally, she threw in the limes, poured a small amount of water over everything, and then commenced macerating and grinding the lot into a paste using the stone as a pestle. When everything was a nasty, greenish-looking pulp to Hill’s watching eye, she began to add water until there was a thick, sludgy drink, clear to the brim of the bowl, which she held up to him with a smile.