Ruby falls, p.12
Ruby Falls, page 12
He focuses on the curves of the passageway and tries to forget the faces behind him. He tries to forget about canteens and deadlines and the blister rubbing on his big toe. People who swear by resoling shoes with tire rubber don’t spend their days walking through standing water, so when last Friday came and went without his paycheck, he dug these twenty-year-old boots from his father’s closet. He needs them to work out some sort of compromise with his too-long toes because even when his paycheck does show up, he still owes nearly four dollars for Aunt Arlene’s two nights in the hospital, and the pneumonia jacket was another dollar on top of that.
Her coughing is no better. He can hear her gurgling through the walls of the room he shares with his father, who hardly makes any noise at all these days. Everyone is always talking about how the rock closes in on you down here, but it’s only aboveground that Talmadge feels a weight pressing on him.
Water seeps along the edge of the ceiling, and it must have been seeping for centuries because it’s formed a bit of drapery like pointed teeth, and what does it matter, over the eons, that he lies awake at night listening to the sleep sounds of a gray-haired man and a stoop-backed woman, knowing if either of them need something, he needs to figure out how to get it?
It matters.
“It’s been eight hours,” he says, stopping. He makes himself look at the others. “We’ve got four left, and it’s going to take us at least three to get back to the elevator. I’d vote we start circling back.”
“You can’t be suggesting we give up before the allotted time,” Mrs. Hagathorn says.
He’s not sure she’s spoken to him before, although maybe she yelled at him about the canteen. He makes an effort to keep his voice calm as he studies the map in his head. He could get them back to the waterfall in an hour.
“We wouldn’t be giving up,” he says. “If we keep heading deeper, there’s no way we’d be aboveground when the twelve hours is up.”
“I have the full twelve hours to search,” the mind reader says. “Which means I have the right to head anywhere I choose.”
“You’d still be searching for the entire twelve hours,” Talmadge says.
“He does have the right to choose,” Mr. Efrom says, struggling to unscrew his canteen. “It’s what we agreed to.”
Blast it, Talmadge thinks at him, wishing desperately that at least one person down here could manage to read his mind. Help me out.
“It doesn’t matter to me if he finds it or doesn’t find it,” says the newspaperman. His too-long pant leg has caught under his boot. “But the dice are still rolling, so I’ve got no interest in your hustling us out of here early.”
“It’s not negotiable,” Tom says, mulish. “The timing is in the contract. You can’t force us out.”
For the first time, Talmadge sees the fundamental flaw in this plan. Everyone but the newspaperman has a stake in staying down here until the crazy man finds the hatpin, and even the newspaperman isn’t eager to stop the demonstration. No one is going to yank the plug; they’re willing to let the water get icy and keep pretending they’re having a nice, warm bath. And Talmadge would bet all the money in his billfold that when the clock does strike ten, Hagathorn still won’t admit he’s failed. He’s going to push to stay down here as long as it takes, and these people won’t even argue.
They are not going to let him turn them around.
Howard has pulled the small notepad from his jacket pocket. Every time they stop, he jots down a few more notes. The manager has slumped against a wall, rubbing at the back of his neck. Everyone seems to be rubbing at something.
Talmadge tries once more.
“I’m only trying to keep on schedule,” he says. “You never know what might happen down here.”
“Surely you have extra supplies in case the unexpected happens,” Howard says.
“Yeah,” Talmadge says. “I have extras. But you don’t want to push it too far and get us stranded, food and water gone, lights gone dead.”
He’s trying to scare them, yes. He’s not sure how low they are on anything. Quinton and the woman have the emergency supplies.
“I don’t understand,” Howard says, stopping his scribbling. “The risk of getting lost or running behind was inherent. You should have brought sufficient emergency supplies.”
The man’s tone irritates Talmadge. The word “inherent” irritates him, as does “sufficient.” These people pack a sandwich in their pocket and believe they’re carrying their own weight.
“You’ve dragged yourself through a few tight spots,” he says. “How many times did your canteen snag? How many times did you have to work to get your backside through? I’m carrying more than the rest of you combined, but every can of beans takes up space. I wasn’t packing for a camping trip.”
Hagathorn steps close enough that Talmadge has to crook his neck to look at him. Maybe this tactic works on people aboveground, but size is no advantage down here. It’s a handicap.
“I know what you’re doing,” the mind reader says.
“Do you?” Talmadge bites out. It’s difficult not to give the man a shove.
“You want to keep me from finding it,” Hagathorn says.
“Mr. Hagathorn—” starts Mr. Efrom.
Talmadge holds up a hand. He stops himself from ramming that hand into the middle of the mind reader’s chest, and he forces himself to laugh instead.
“I’m being paid to help you find it,” he says. “It is my job. My job. I’m desperate for you to find the ever-loving hatpin.”
“We could use another break,” Mr. Efrom says, raising his voice. “We’re on edge, is all. But I promise you, Professor, we’re all working for the same thing.”
“Are we?” Hagathorn says. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe the two of you have upheld your end of the bargain.”
If Morris Efrom has seemed dulled, this sharpens him. He is all edges when he turns to Hagathorn.
“Are you truly trying to blame this on us?” he asks.
“It’s the only explanation,” Hagathorn says. He is not exactly lit up with power at the moment, his beard streaked with soot and what might be mustard.
“It is not the only explanation,” Talmadge says.
Behind him, the newspaperman is scrawling on his pad with his nubby pencil. Talmadge glances back to the teeth in the ceiling: The path ahead of them is a giant maw opening. The entire group has gathered around the mind reader, lamps shining, strangers all of them.
“Fine,” Talmadge says. “Onward.”
He makes it all of twenty steps before a hand lands on his elbow. “Stop putting your hands on me,” he says, making every word clear and cold.
“I’ll put my hands where necessary,” Hagathorn says, even as he lets go. “You didn’t announce a junction.”
For all his thoughts of speeding along this process, Talmadge wasn’t ignoring a turn. The gap the mind reader is eyeing doesn’t lead anywhere, at least not for a human. Maybe the salamanders have built entire kingdoms back there, but no creature bigger than a breadbox will ever know.
“It’s not a junction,” Talmadge says.
“This won’t work if I don’t trust you,” the professor says.
“Go on, then,” Talmadge says. Trust hasn’t been part of the equation for hours. “Lead the way.”
It’s childish, he knows. The passage requires a belly crawl for all of twenty feet before it becomes impassable, but he wouldn’t mind seeing a little fear in the professor. Panic might make him more biddable.
It also might be fun to watch.
Hagathorn slides into the slot, arms and head disappearing smoothly enough. He’s halfway inside before he stops. His feet kick twice, and his hips jerk against the rock. His stomach is surely the problem, although his rear end looks plenty round from this angle, too.
“Satisfied?” Talmadge says, and he can hear Mr. Efrom laughing softly and then not so softly. The reporter is grinning.
The mind reader answers, but the rock distorts the words into gobbledygook. They all watch him wriggle for, perhaps, too long.
“Miah?” says Mrs. Hagathorn, dropping to the balls of her feet. She glances at Talmadge, and he sobers.
“Come on back,” he says. “It only gets tighter.”
“I can’t,” Hagathorn calls.
Talmadge makes out those words just fine. “Suck in a breath and let it all the way out,” he says. “Relax and stop moving. You’ll slip right back out.”
But Hagathorn isn’t relaxing. His boots kick frantically, and his torso is twisting in a way that will only wedge him deeper.
“Stop,” Talmadge says. “You have to just stop moving.”
“Jeremiah,” Tom says, nearly shouting. “You need to be still.”
Hagathorn does not listen to either one of them. His breathing is filling up the entire cavern, and he’s only twisting faster. No one is smiling now.
“I can’t get out,” Hagathorn says, panting. He’s going to make himself pass out if he keeps on.
“You’ll be fine,” Talmadge says, kneeling. “I got you. But stop moving. You hear me?”
Hagathorn obeys to some extent: His boots slow down enough for Talmadge to grab hold, and he gives a yank, but he only feels a pop in the other man’s knees. The meat of his body doesn’t budge. Talmadge adjusts his grip and pulls harder, and this time Hagathorn screams, quick and loud.
Here is the fear Talmadge wanted, and it is not fun. The wife is looking at him again, and he doesn’t like looking back at her.
“It’s too tight,” gasps Hagathorn. “Stop.”
“There must be some sort of tool or something that could help get him loose,” Howard says.
“Yeah,” Talmadge says. “There’s something.”
He yanks again. Hagathorn’s scream is briefer this time. Inside the rock, fabric rips, the sound like a husk being ripped loose from an ear of corn. It takes another half dozen tugs to get Hagathorn free, and when he finally slides into the open air, his chest is bleeding through his shirt. His glove has come off. He’s conscious and clear-eyed, though, as he flops against the wall, and Talmadge hears the reporter’s pencil, scritching and scritching.
6:40 p.m.
If they started this search in tunnels that were once rivers, these passageways would barely have qualified as creeks. Ada and Quinton have not gotten off their hands and knees in at least a quarter mile.
Everything ahead has been quiet since Hagathorn’s accident. That drama played out as loud and clear as a program on the radio, so Ada wasn’t shocked when—once they started moving forward again—her light picked up splotches of blood. It dripped along the trail for a few yards like breadcrumbs, but she hasn’t seen a trace of red in nearly an hour, which must be a good sign.
“It’s easier if you roll onto your back,” Quinton says, motioning her into a downward-sloped tunnel on their right. “Feel the ledge above you, and just pull up.”
She trusts him. She eases in headfirst, her back sliding against the limestone, arms over her head, almost like slipping on a dress. She wriggles until her fingers feel the lip of the rock above her, pulls herself through, then flips onto her hands and knees again. As she starts crawling, the sight of the path opening up is more beautiful than any sunrise she’s ever seen. She has at least a foot of open space over her head. The giddiness of it makes her speed up, and as she rounds a bend, she sees a pair of legs not five feet in front of her.
She freezes, slapping a hand over her headlamp. Behind her, Quinton rests a hand on her ankle. When they’ve heard nothing for a long time, he removes his hand.
“No one looks behind them in a cave,” he says. “Too busy looking ahead of them.”
“There’s no way they put the hatpin this far in,” she says.
She hasn’t recognized a single thing since they left the waterfall. She’s tried to stop questioning things because that’s not her job. She only needs to play follow-the-leader for a little while longer, and they will all go home. Still, she doesn’t understand what’s happening.
“No,” Quinton says. “Surely not.”
His hand lands on her ankle again, and he gives a tug. She inches backward, turning as much as she can. She can’t see much of him, but she can see the wall.
More signatures. A handful of them spread over several feet, disconnected. She’s still not sure why she and Quinton have wound up in this particular passage, but the men who came before them are simple enough to understand. They wanted to see how far they could go, and they wanted to leave a record of it.
“No matter how deep you go, the names keep popping up,” Quinton says.
Ada sees the glint of his pocketknife before she knows what it is. When he offers it to her handle first, she’s slow to take it. She’s never done this before.
“We don’t want to run into a pair of boots again,” Quinton says, nodding down the tunnel. “Go on. Give it a try.”
She shifts her grip on the hilt of the knife, studying the wall.
“Maybe just initials,” he says.
She thought the entire point of carving your name was to make yourself known. She looks from Quinton to the knife and back again. He shrugs one shoulder.
“My sister got her name scraped off once or twice,” he says. “A girl’s name. A woman’s. It can be tempting for a certain kind of clown.”
“People do that?” she asks, and then wishes she could take the question back. She doesn’t know why it shocks her, not when she well remembers her father laughing, head thrown back, when she was six and said she wanted to be a doctor. And didn’t her mother tell her that women should never sit with their knees apart and didn’t her mother-in-law tell her to be careful about walking too much or she’d get mannish legs and didn’t Gerald tell her no decent man would have a wife who worked? And why, even now, long after they are all gone, does she wait and change into pants when she’s at the bottom of the elevator with no one to see?
She knows the boundaries, but she wasn’t aware they extended this deep.
“Some,” Quinton says.
She breathes in the cool damp of the rock and writes Ada Smith in her head, without touching the wall. Actually, she’s never liked “Smith,” so commonplace. It was an argument against marrying Gerald. Before him, she was Ada Fallon, but she hardly knows that girl anymore.
Maybe just initials. She studies the names and almost names cut into the limestone, flicking her gloved thumb over her blade.
david ullrich
d. brooks barlow
j. kubesch
She often tries to picture the person behind the signature. Isn’t that what David Ullrich or D. Brooks Barlow wanted her to do when they crouched in this same spot—didn’t they hope to be summoned from the ether? And yet she’s bound to get it wrong. She’ll imagine white hair when he was a schoolboy or she’ll see gentle hands when he beat his wife. A name is not a self. The initials, at least, concede that. They leave blanks that cannot be filled. She could be looking at Daniel Brooks Barlow or Dylan Brooks Barlow, or, apparently, Darlene Brooks Barlow. Each period is a universe.
She thinks of Ruby, whose name will be written across billboards and barns and road maps, a testament to how much her husband loves her. Ada will never have her name on a map. She will fade into oblivion, like everyone in the history of her family, farmers and coal miners and wives, entire lives lived and forgotten other than at the bite of a tomato.
She lifts the knife. Even if no one ever sees it, her name in this wall will not fade. It will not be the real her—the whole her—but she doesn’t mind. She does not want to be filled in: She wants spaces that no one can conjure, no matter how many times they run their fingers over the shape of her.
Her hand takes over, carving the first lines before she decides them, boring into the rock. She twists and digs and blows away limestone dust until she is looking at herself:
a.d.a.
Ruby’s name can be on every sign. Ada’s is cut into the mountain. No one gifted it to her. She climbed and shoved her way here to carve her own self, and if anyone wants to scratch if off, they will have to cut deeper than she has. She does not believe they can do it.
7:10 p.m.
Howard
Eventually a certain level of familiarity takes hold if you’re sharing a cup of coffee with a man, notepad in hand. Same if you’re walking through his back pasture or sitting on his porch. Comfort. It’s the key to a good interview. It lets a person’s words slip out without too much thought, and Howard’s always believed unthinking answers are the best ones.
He’s spent today waiting for Jeremiah Hagathorn to get comfortable, but it’s just now occurring to him that discomfort might knock loose the best answers of all. “Discomfort” isn’t a strong enough word for what’s happening down here: These men are seeping desperation like the walls are seeping water. Hagathorn—the most desperate of all—is humiliated and furious after being shoehorned into the mountain, and he’s anxious for a way to reinflate himself.
“I’ve been wondering, Professor,” Howard says, pausing mid-crawl. He glances toward the man behind him. “That trick where you drive blindfolded—how do you do it?”
The steady glare of Hagathorn’s helmet would seem hostile except that all light is welcome down here.
“It’s not a trick,” Hagathorn says. The blood on his shirt is still wet.
