Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

McCarty sighed, a theatrical gust that Anna could hear down in her rabbit hole. "You can always leave," he said.

"Right." Sondra laughed without joy. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? What? You expect me to go back to being a secretary? Fetching coffee for editors, old fat white men who have less talent in their whole bodies than I've got in my little toe?"

"If you ever got anybody coffee-which I doubt-I suspect they had the good sense not to drink it," Peter snapped. There was anger in his words this time; his pose of world-weary patience was slipping. Sondra must have scented weakness. When she spoke again, she redoubled her attack.

"I'll leave all right. When I'm ready. Maybe sooner than you think. All I need is one good story. When I go I'll take everything but your toothbrush and your little black book. If you lift a finger to stop me, I'll see your license is jerked, doctor."

"I wouldn't push your luck if I were you." The trite comeback was so laden with ice and threat that Sondra fell quiet.

Anna decided this was not a good time to pop out of a hole in the floor and yell "surprise." Moving as quietly as possible, she squirmed backward, filling the cuffs of her trousers with dirt until, hind parts foremost, she regained her little patch of land on the inside of the crawl way.

"What's it like?" Curt had arrived. He sat in inky darkness, his long legs and heavily booted feet sprawled over their tiny room.

"Squishy," Anna said succinctly. "Could you not breathe for a bit? I think there's only enough air for me."

"No problem."

He was quiet while Anna clambered over his knees and settled herself on a rock bracketed by his boots.

"Let me go through first," she said. "The crawl space is way too small for you. You're going to get wedged. I don't want to be stuck behind you."

"Will you bring me sandwiches?" he asked. He seemed utterly imperturbable, his voice light and laconic for so bulky a man.

"Nope. Once I'm out of here I'm never going to let anything between me and the sun again. I'll buy a convertible, sleep out of doors."

"I won't get wedged," Curt said. "My father was a rodent. My mother says a rat, but after further research I'm inclined to believe he was a common field mouse. I inherited his bones, mouse bones. Mine can fold in on each other allowing me to pass through apertures too small for mortal men. Once, on a dare, I crawled through the pop-top hole in a Coors can."

"Hah."

Half a beat of silence followed, then he added this note of verisimilitude: "I did have to strip down to my shorts to do it."

Darkness reclaimed them, and that total absence of sound that is peculiar to caves. Not a whisper of air, not a sound of the movement of grasses, birdsong, running water, the stars spinning in their orbits. Anna took it as long as she could. To break the silence before it solidified, she asked, "What brought you to Lechuguilla?"

"You're not of the Minnesota connection? I'm surprised Frieda thinks so highly of you. Where are you from?"

"Originally, California."

A groan.

"Northern California."

"That's okay then. Not Minnesota, but you get snow, right? I used to teach at the University of Minnesota. I got my Ph.D. there. That's how I hooked up with Peter and Sondra. Met him at a grotto meeting. He married her. Caving is a small world. Especially in Minnesota, land of ten thousand lakes. If there are any caves there, we call 'em aquifers."

"Zeddie?" Anna asked.

"Doubly connected. Frieda and her sister were pals. And she was an undergraduate. She had me for Leisure 101."

"How did she do?" Anna asked for lack of anything better to say.

"She was a vacant-eyed little snipe," Curt said as if this fact were obvious. "All students are vacant-eyed little snipes."

Anna couldn't tell if he was joking or not. "Was Brent a student of yours? Adult ed," she added, realizing Roxbury was probably ten years Curt's senior.

"Are you suggesting Brent is a vacant-eyed little snipe?" Curt asked innocently.

Anna fumbled around for a minute, grateful for once for the darkness. Curt relented. "No. Brent's an outsider. Either Zeddie or Frieda asked him on. Or maybe he was tagged on by George Laymon. We needed another surveyor. I've worked with worse."

From Schatz, Anna gathered this was high praise indeed.

"Frieda's parents lived in Anoka," Anna remembered.

"She used to be a patient of McCarty's," Curt said. "Or maybe it was her mother. I can't remember. I met her on an expedition in Mexico."

"Peter is a GP?" Anna asked.

"Gynecologist."

"Jesus. Why is that funny?"

Curt said, "If you're going to talk about stirrups and things, I'm going to leave the room. I'm very shallow. It's one of the things I like most about myself."

"Turtling!" was shouted down the insulating passage behind them. They buckled on their hard hats, dragged Frieda over three more spines, set the Stokes on the floor, then pushed it through the crawl space to the waiting hands of the McCartys.

One more inching of their sixteen-bodied worm, and Frieda was delivered from the cramped passage.

The tunnel opened into a low-ceilinged room studded with formations and ending in a lip ten or twelve feet across and a couple of feet deep. A yard below was a second step of like dimensions, then a ninety-foot drop into a pit. The opening where they emerged marked the pit's halfway point. It continued upward, smooth as poured cement, for another forty feet. On the far side, going out of the top, was a black hole, shaped like a keyhole, about nine feet high, wide at the bottom then narrowing in to a wasp-waist of rock to open again in a slit no more than a foot and a half wide and half again that long.

The pit, Anna remembered, was dubbed the Cocktail Lounge. At one time it had been partially filled with water. Formations shaped like giant golf tees-or cocktail tables, if one hailed from New York City-had formed in the bottom. There were seven in all, made of stone coming out of solution as it dripped from above over the millennia. Beneath the water, it had built up in slender columns. When it reached the surface, the stone spread out in ever-widening circles, floating like petrified lily pads on the lake. At some point the water had drained away or dried up and left only the pit and the nine-foot-high tables looking as if they were made of alabaster and inlaid with gold. Every square inch of the formations was covered in decorations. Small puff excrescences called popcorn studded the columns. Tiny stalactites dripped by the thousands from the undersides of the tabletops. Layer after layer of stone had formed with such delicacy and infinite variety that the formations presented larger-than-life sculptures by a mad, genius god fascinated with rococo baroque.

They made Anna nervous. They were so beautiful, a testament to the sanctity of the deep caverns; she knew she was doomed to stumble over her bootlaces and take them all down like a row of priceless dominoes. Infamy would dog her to the grave and beyond as it would the man who had smashed Michelangelo's Pieta.

Schatz, Dillard, Tillman, and Roxbury were rigging the descent. The others rested and kept out of the way. Anna edged over to where Frieda lay in the Stokes.

"I've got to sit up," Frieda said. Anna understood. Too long on one's back was disorienting. She left Frieda and returned with McCarty's permission to let her sit as long as she had help, wasn't left alone, and the cervical collar remained in place.

"God, that feels good," Frieda said as she gently worked her arms and shoulders. "Have you ever had a tooth crowned? Lain in the dentist's chair till you felt you were going to La La Land or bite the next finger that came into your mouth?" Anna nodded. "Like that."

She drank from the water bottle secured in the Stokes near her hand. "Are we alone?" she asked.