Ruby falls, p.10
Ruby Falls, page 10
He toes his duffle bag closer to the wall. She doesn’t envy him maneuvering it through the gaps and squeezes. She’s carrying a much smaller pack across her shoulder, and she’s still struggling to shove her supplies through the smaller spaces. Quinton has extra carbide cartridges, rope, bandages, three canteens of water, and all of it is likely pointless. With a little luck, they could be back aboveground by sunset.
Time and distance are deceptive here. After all these hours, she thinks she could make it back to the elevator in half an hour, if she guessed the turns right.
Quinton sinks down along a smooth swathe of limestone, taking his helmet in one hand and letting his head fall back with a groan. She sits as well, running a hand through her hair as she takes off her own helmet. It feels good to let her head breathe. She opens her canteen and takes a long drink.
“Pecans?” he says, shoving a hand in his pocket.
“Oh,” she says, fishing inside her pack, and now what seemed like a good idea feels silly. Grandmotherly. “I have this. In case. For us both, if you want.”
She gives up on full sentences and pulls out two folded napkins, damp with grease. She unfolds the first, holding out a block of cold macaroni and cheese. She made a pan last night when she couldn’t sleep, thinking it would be a treat, and, if she’s honest, some sort of testament to her value as a partner, but in this moment it feels clear that worthy people don’t need to prove themselves and that this is not a picnic. The macaroni is congealed and misshapen with the bits of noodles looking more like larvae than she would like.
“Macaroni salad?” Quinton says, grinning.
She hopes her face doesn’t give away her relief.
“My mother used to make it for church suppers,” she says, handing over his slice. “She said she was the first person in Etowah County to do it where you cooked the noodles in the oven instead of beforehand.”
She cannot remember the last time she told the story of this recipe. Gerald and Ruby and plenty of others have heard about her mother’s claim to fame, but it’s been a long time since she’s said it aloud.
Quinton takes a bite, napkin flapping under his chin. In the strange dimness of caves, the cheese has turned the gold of sunlight. She bites into her own slice and wishes she’d added more salt.
“Do you think he can do it?” she asks.
“Seems like he would have done it by now, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” She is not impressed by the mind reader. “It’s not how I thought it would be.”
“What did you think?”
She takes her time chewing as she considers her answer. “That he’d be more in command. That someone would be more in command. This feels like—”
“Wandering,” he says, finding the right word before she can. “It might feel different, I suppose, if we could hear a full sentence every now and then.”
Their two lamps illuminate a circle around them, shadows flailing every time they lift an arm or take a drink. Beyond that, the blackness has hints of planes and angles, if Ada wanted to look. Back in the beginning, she thought the darkness in a cave would gnaw at you over time, but the truth is that, like everything else outside your circle of flame, it ceases to exist. There is no darkness.
You stop seeing anything after a while, she supposes, like the peeling paint on her windows or the extra rooms in her house that used to seem empty but now don’t seem anything at all.
“If he’s a fraud, you’d think someone would have caught him by now,” she says. “Maybe it’s like he says. Maybe it’s not predictable.”
“Maybe.”
She sets down her canteen, picking it up again when she sees a trickle of dark movement near her hip. It’s a trail of ants gorging themselves on a dead salamander. Two pale millipedes and a cricket inch closer, hoping.
“You think Talmadge will show him where the pin is?” she asks.
“No. Not yet, at least.”
This matches her own thinking. She assumes that if the hours stretch out, Talmadge or Morris could offer a few silent or not-so-silent hints.
“Because if it turns out Hagathorn is a fraud,” she says, “I have trouble thinking we should help him out.”
Quinton swipes at a strand of cheese on his beard. “May not matter. Nudging him along wouldn’t be easy with the newspaperman watching.”
She’s not hungry, but she knows she needs to eat. She makes herself finish the last two bites of macaroni, and she tries not to look at the remains of the salamander. She’s read they eat their own tails if they’re starving.
“If they’re going to help him,” she says, “I wish they’d go on and do it. And if he has any ability, I wish he’d go on and show it.”
“You’re not the patient kind, are you?” he says.
It feels like a compliment.
“I don’t like not knowing,” she says.
He wads up his napkin, pauses, and lets it fall open again. He spreads it across one thigh, folds it carefully, and hands it back to her.
“Spoken like anyone who’s ever climbed into a hole in the ground,” he says. “You know they’re cannibals?”
It takes her a moment to realize he’s looking at the salamander.
“I thought they ate themselves,” she says.
“That, too. But also each other. Everything’s hungry all the time down here.”
When she looks up into the beam of her own light, motes float and swirl all the way to the ceiling. Someone coughs down the passageway, a sign of life.
Quinton lights a cigarette, and as he inhales, he taps the wall behind them. Only then does she see the names: edward or edwin skelton. Or skellon. The letters have faded enough that the signature has blurred into more than one person. The name below it could be b. goodwin or possibly h. goodwin, with adalde below. t.a. kirby is carved very clearly, as is j.l. wesley, portland, 1862.
“Civil War soldiers thinking this might be their last chance to leave a mark on the world,” Quinton says.
Ada would like to know how long it takes before a name evaporates entirely. Sometimes she sees markings that are barely there, more like bird scratchings than letters.
“Adalde,” she says, pointing. “You think that’s a name or a place?”
“Place, I bet,” Quinton says. “But I’d rather it be a name. I like the odd ones. Farrow Hailstone, I saw once.”
“Mitty Mindwell,” she counters.
“We used to do it with smoke from a carbon light when we were small,” he says. “Write our own names next to the ones on the wall, long dead, nothing left of them but letters. A hundred years from now, they’ll say the same thing about me.”
He sounds happy enough about it. She thinks of her imaginings in the crystal room, her longing for medicine men or rumrunners to have stood in her place, a string of invisible twine connecting them.
A rustle carries through the passageways—feet and gravel and the bang of a canteen, and while they don’t sound quite like buffalo, these people are not difficult to track. She and Quinton stand; she refastens her helmet and tucks the used napkins into her pack. He swings his bag over his shoulder.
The passages splinter more often as they move deeper into the mountain. Quinton knows the overlaps and intersections, and he keeps them moving in such a way that they hear voices every few minutes. Ada recognizes some rooms—a swathe of drapery, a head-high column, a certain long expanse where she flattens like a flounder—but she doesn’t have a map in her head like Quinton does.
The larger group seems to be avoiding the tightest passages, but she and Quinton take advantage of the shortcuts. He steps to an opening the size of a manhole, dropping his bag through and then slipping down himself. As soon as he hits the ground, he crawls forward and she follows, too close at first, nearly getting his boot in her face. The macaroni jostles in her belly as the slabs of rock around them spread out and the ceiling lifts. They push to their feet, side by side, just as a man shouts in pain from somewhere through the walls.
A long groan follows, nearly swallowed up by a burst of agitated voices.
Ada starts forward, hunchbacked. Quinton grabs her by the shoulder, yanking her backward.
“Wait,” he says.
The voices are already quieting. She hears Morris’s laugh, abashed. She can make out Talmadge’s tone—calm enough—but not his words. Quinton lets go of her. She hates being on the edges, only guessing at what’s happening, never given a clear view. It’s like watching a play from behind a pole, the kind of seat you pay half price for.
The two of them move in fits and starts, spending long minutes frozen with their backs millimeters from the ceiling. During one pause, Quinton wriggles into a shallow nook, and when he turns, he’s got a bone in his hands.
“Hellbender salamander,” he whispers.
Not a bone—an entire skeleton, over a foot long, the tail of the thing hanging over his hands. He slides it into her palms, and she expects it to feel like a chicken carcass pulled out of hot broth, but it’s delicate and cool and light as a necklace, the best present anyone’s ever given her. They both stare at the long spine with its feathered vertebrae, the stumpy legs and missing foot bones, and eventually she realizes he didn’t mean it as a present. It would shatter into shards if she tried to tuck it in her satchel.
She inches past him, easing the skeleton back where he found it. When she turns, he’s already moving forward, half crouched. Every time she looks at him, she hopes to discover that the flush of attraction was entirely imagined, but she keeps discovering the opposite.
At the next opening, she and Quinton wait until the path ahead of them goes dark, and then they crawl into a chamber that Ada recognizes. The walls are spires, with hundreds of packed stalagmites spiking toward the ceiling. It’s like a cathedral. The ground is wetter in here, and shallow puddles line the walls. The mind reader and his gang are at the far end of the massive room, several hundred feet away, hidden by the bend of a wall. Ada hears a trickling, and she’d guess the others are looking at the skinny waterfall that only comes to life after a good rain.
That seems to be her only option: guessing. She can hear footsteps but no voices as she leans against the rock behind her. The footsteps turn wet. Eventually someone murmurs, and someone answers.
Again, she hates this. If they find the hatpin, she and Quinton likely won’t even realize it.
She sinks to her bottom, and her light makes the rocks shine in the puddles, candy-like. There’s one the color of caramel that she imagines popping in her mouth. She’d like to roll it over her tongue, suck it, crunch it in her teeth. The endless waiting seems to be shoving her mind in strange directions.
A rush of wordless sound echoes off the walls. A gasp. Metal clangs against rock, and, next to her, Quinton jolts.
“You idiot,” Talmadge shouts, and she supposes Quinton was right. They will hear if someone screams.
Ada doesn’t think she’s ever heard Talmadge raise his voice. Whoever speaks next is quieter, though, and the words don’t carry.
“I told you about the water,” Talmadge answers, still too loud. “It’ll tear through you, and you’ll be stranded down here, hunched over with the runs.”
“You could have said that,” the professor says, “instead of—”
“I did,” Talmadge says. “You don’t pay attention.”
“I do when someone is worth paying attention to.”
Either Talmadge has calmed himself or he’s hissing his insults too quietly for Ada to hear. She takes off her helmet and sets it on the ground, the light falling across her shins. She pulls out her flashlight, which is easier to direct.
“I’m going to take a quick look,” she whispers.
Quinton shakes his head, but she ignores him, and when she starts forward, he doesn’t follow. She keeps close to the wall, her shoulder and hip skimming along rock with every step. She keeps the flashlight pointing down. The outcropping of rock jutting in front of her blocks her view of everyone just as it blocks their view of her.
“Leave it there,” a man says, and she can’t tell which one.
“We don’t have endless water,” Talmadge says. He sounds more exhausted than angry now. “I’ll get it.”
“There’s no way,” says—maybe—Morris.
“I’ll tie a rope,” Talmadge says. “It’s not quite a vertical climb.”
Ada turns off the flashlight and presses her cheek against the edge of the outcropping. In the darkness of the room, the six people with headlamps might as well be in a spotlight. Her view is limited because of the formations rising from the ground, but she sees why Talmadge doesn’t sound enthusiastic about the offer he’s making.
He’s looking up at spired limestone that rises at least thirty feet to the ceiling. Someone else’s lamp catches the glint of something hanging from a strap on a ledge more than halfway up the wall.
A canteen, she guesses. It’s baffling how it would have gotten there.
“I only need—” Talmadge starts.
“What the hell are you doing?” someone says as another voice shouts, “Careful!”
“Shit,” Talmadge says, loud and clear.
Ada hears soft sounds of movement and gravel pinging into puddles, but her view is still obscured, and it’s a moment before another figure comes into view. It’s the wife. She’s climbing the wall of the cavern, no rope or harness in sight. She’s higher than the men’s heads, making her way up the rock as if it’s a ladder.
4:30 p.m.
Editha
She’s always liked heights, and for that she can thank the fine people of Barnum & Bailey who used to winter across the field from her house on Route 124. She was small and polite, and they called her a natural when she wobbled on the tightrope. Fearless, they said, when she launched herself off the trapeze, and they were friendly people who weren’t around children often and likely would have said the same thing about any six-year-old, especially one who had more bruises than she should.
They gave her sandwiches sometimes. They were responsible for her first taste of strawberry jam. Pick my eye paint for me tonight? the handwalker would say, and onstage her name was Anastasia but her real name was Mona. Just leave me the banana, Mr. Wilson would warn, holding out his bag of taffy, but if Ada picked anything but banana he would press one into her hand anyway because he knew it was her favorite. He was a bicyclist, white-haired but still able to jump a gap of twenty feet.
They are the kindest people in the world, circus people. Editha would bet on them against nuns any day. When it comes to her childhood, the people in that barn are the only part she chooses to recall.
By the time she was twelve, they gave fewer compliments and more instructions. At that stage, she was eighty pounds of pure lean muscle: If she’d been a calf, she’d have been too tough to eat. It turned out she had a real talent for the vertical rope, or the corde lisse, as she preferred to call it because everything sounded better in French. She started with the basic leg wraps and lean-outs and moved on to upside-down hangs, and she dislocated her shoulder trying to master a crucifixion. Before breasts and hips weighed her down, she could move on the rope like she was underwater, pulled to the top by the forces of nature itself. She lay on her pallet at night imagining some future winter where she would leave Peru, Indiana, and become one of the acrobats in the barn, but then the stage manager put his hands on her, which was another thing she blamed on breasts and hips until she got old enough and smart enough to blame the stage manager.
She can hear the men talking among themselves below, or maybe they’re still talking to her. It doesn’t matter. They don’t matter. They throw canteens at walls. All that matters is the satisfaction of a solid grip and a firm foothold, the pleasant pull in her thigh as she makes a long lunge. It’s been too long since she’s worked her muscles like this, and she’s missed the ache, although her fingers are throbbing. Her palms have lost their callouses, and she’s ripped two nails below the quick.
“If you can get good footing, I can throw you a rope,” Talmadge shouts, and she’s always found it hard to take instructions from someone who’s younger than she is.
She’s a few feet from the canteen. Why would the fool think she needs a rope at this stage?
She intuits a ledge with her big toe and seizes it with the ball of her foot, triumphant. Satisfaction is a matter of inches.
After the barn lost its gloss, she settled on another escape route. The summer she turned sixteen, she climbed on a Greyhound bus with no guilt—her father had left long before her, her mother would be grateful for the extra bedroom, and her brother was barely old enough to know she existed. She stepped off the bus in Kokomo and worked for a month picking corn. She was hungry most nights, but that was nothing new, and it was a small price to pay for a revelation: She could learn anything. After Kokomo, she learned how to pluck chickens in a poultry farm outside Fowler, although she never mastered ducks. She could type fifty words a minute, which was sufficient if secretarial work was all she could find. She liked the rope, though. The circus had lodged in her mind as a safe place—the smell of sawdust—the velvet thump of elephant feet—and she was always trying to get back there. When she met Jeremiah in Cincinnati, she’d been working on a rope routine modeled after Leona Dare’s iron jaw bit, and she’d been nowhere near skilled enough, but she could finagle it with a clear strap behind her head, hidden under her hair.
Jeremiah had been doing his hot-and-cold act, finding watches and handing out flowers to a respectable amount of applause, and he came up to her at the end of the night and asked her for coffee. That was twelve years ago, hard to believe.
“You’ll need it to get back down,” Talmadge calls, and Editha can’t remember if she ever answered him about the rope.
