Ruby falls, p.14
Ruby Falls, page 14
She’s pleased she doesn’t sound sheepish. No one has ever explained the etiquette of going to relieve yourself in a cave, and when she excused herself earlier this afternoon, she’s not sure what words came out of her.
“Ah,” he says, eyes opening. “If you want to—”
“I was thinking we should move into the upper chamber,” she interrupts, both because she would like to change the topic and because this is a legitimate concern. “If any of the others also want a moment of . . . privacy, they might wander in this direction.”
He agrees with her. They have almost entirely agreed with each other, which has made these long hours easier than they might have been. He tells her he’ll head up after she’s had a few minutes to herself, and he closes his eyes again as she slings on her pack and sizes up the wall behind her for handholds. In another moment, she’s hauling herself over the ledge into the upper passageway.
She stands, brushing her blackened gloves. With time, the layout of a cave is as knowable as the layout of a house. This one might be a mansion with endless hallways, but she has a solid picture of the rooms around her. Talmadge’s group has made camp below on the first floor. The passage now in front of her leads to a set of second-floor rooms. It’s as simple as taking a set of stairs from the sitting room to the bedrooms.
She really does need to pee.
Her light skims over the mottled rock, mostly mud colored now. The soot hasn’t penetrated this far. A translucent, blind crayfish in a puddle near her feet darts away from the light. She suspects it’s been raining aboveground—the walls are trickling water, and the drip of stalactites rings from the shadows. A heavy rain would be bad news—it could mean flooding down here, and even shallow water would chill them to the bone.
She moves down the passage and looks behind her twice before she pulls off her gloves and loosens her pants. This would be much easier with a skirt. She’s lowering her pants with one hand and holding on to a knob of stalagmite with the other when she hears voices. She jumps, stumbling, and she’s buttoned up before she realizes that the voices are coming from the lower level. Heart pumping, she crosses the chamber and finds a split in the floor wider than her shoulders: When she tilts her headlamp, she’s looking down at the first floor of the house, maybe twenty feet below her.
The voices become louder, and they puzzle her. If the people below her want privacy for the same reasons she did, it doesn’t make sense that she’s hearing both a male and female voice. The woman can only be Editha, but the other voice is less obvious.
“—appreciate you not mentioning,” Editha’s saying.
“You thought I’d announce it as I shook hands with your husband?” the man asks.
The conversation is clearer than if Ada were listening on the telephone. The two headlamps light up the sliver of canyon visible through the crevice below her.
“It crossed my mind,” Editha says.
“I didn’t even tell him my full name, not that he asked. He’s not the curious sort.”
“You’d be surprised,” Editha says.
Bits of silhouettes—a forearm, a leg—wobble across the rock below. Editha and the man are almost directly underneath Ada.
“When did you realize it was me?” the man asks.
“When Tom introduced you to me before dinner!” Editha hisses. “I assume you made a point of catching me away from Miah. All I knew was that a reporter was joining us. I had no idea you’d become a writer. You could’ve been a lumberjack for all I knew.”
Until now, Ada hasn’t been entirely sure that the man below is Howard. Now that she knows, she’s more confused, not less.
“You could have written,” Howard says. His voice is full, bursting with a feeling Ada can’t name. “Even once. You’d have known all sorts of things. You could have visited. You could have come home.”
“It’s not my home,” Editha says, and her voice is full of nothing.
Ada wishes she could see their faces. The chamber goes silent for long enough that she starts to wonder if they’ve left. Then Editha speaks again.
“How did you find me?” she asks.
“I saw your name in the paper,” Howard says. “Editha Hagathorn, it said, but I figured there weren’t that many Edithas who’d be described as former acrobats. I looked up a photo.”
Acrobat. Ada considers it. She’s never known an acrobat. She puts it in the same category as a bearded lady. When Editha leapt down from the rock wall with the canteen around her neck, she only said, I’ve always been good at climbing.
“You followed me all the way to Chattanooga,” Editha is saying. She does not sound flattered. “Instead of taking your own advice and writing me a letter.”
“You’d shown you had no interest in keeping in touch, hadn’t you? I hoped you’d feel different in person.”
Someone in a more distant chamber belches, and it carries wetly.
“What do you want to happen, Howie?” Editha asks.
“I wanted to talk to you. To meet—your husband.” He pauses. “And now I have, I suppose. I don’t know, Editha. I wanted you to know that you’re not alone. You never were. You have choices, if you want them.”
“I’ve had nothing but choices,” she says. “Endless ones. And I chose Jeremiah.”
One of the shadows below jerks like a horse annoyed by flies. A headlamp veers up and away.
“Surely I know you in ways he can’t,” Howard says.
“You were too young to know me. We were too young.”
“That’s not true,” he says. “Do you remember the way the cold poured through that broken—”
“I don’t,” Editha interrupts. “Listen to me, Howie. I do not remember. I won’t. That’s another choice.”
The voices pause for several long seconds.
“Alright,” Howard says, and now his voice, too, is full of nothing. “I’m here to do my job, Editha. First and foremost. I won’t make trouble for you.”
“Good. Because the last time Jeremiah had any trouble, he broke a man’s wrist.” She and the reporter are walking now, slow steps turning up gravel. “And you are making trouble for me, doing your job. So quick to judge. When I first saw you, I hoped our connection might make you sympathetic to him.”
“That’s what you thought when you first saw me?”
“He’s not a fraud,” Editha snaps. “Give him a chance instead of dismissing him out of spite.”
“That’s not why I’m dismissing him.”
However Editha responds, it doesn’t involve words. A pair of boots thumps rapidly across the limestone, and after a while slower footsteps follow. Once the lower cavern goes dark, Ada steps to the wall, dropping her pants again because apparently curiosity does not numb the bladder. She lets her thoughts spin as the urine hits the ground.
When she heads back around the bend toward Quinton, he’s magicked two thin blankets from his pack.
“The newspaperman and the wife know each other,” she says, dropping to the ground next to him.
“In what sense?” he asks.
His sack of pecans is open by his knee, and shells rustle as he shifts sideways. She explains what she heard, taking off her helmet and blowing out the flame. The light from one helmet is sufficient for now, and they might need the extra carbide later.
“So her husband doesn’t know,” Quinton says.
“Doesn’t seem like.”
He bends his knees, and a pecan tips loose from the sack and rolls across the ground. It stops against Ada’s boot.
“What’s happening down here?” she says.
“Damned if I know.”
“Why would they stop here when they’ve got, what, two hours left? We should be heading back already.”
“I’m hoping we’ll see Talmadge and he can tell us,” Quinton says.
Ada pulls out a candle, which will burn down at about an inch per hour, an interesting fact she’s sure Quinton already knows. The candles are less critical than the carbide, and he nods his agreement without her voicing the thought. Mind reading.
When she pulls out the matchbox, he doesn’t offer to light the candle for her. In fact, he turns his head and spits without apology, not even trying to play the gentleman, which is fine because she is not playing the lady. Her hands are steady and fast, and she surely has the wick lit faster than he could have done it.
He blows out his headlamp as she’s wedging the candle into a crevice. The light it throws is flickering and fanciful, changing the cavern into something suitable for ghosts or dreams. The dim light also hides more than their headlamps, which she appreciates. Her boots and clothes look like she’s been rolling in a coal bin. She suspects her face is coated, too, but she can’t waste the water to clean it.
She watches the swimming shadows, and if part of her wishes for home and bed and bath, a bigger part relishes the reality: She is allowed to be here. She is supposed to be here.
“How long would it take you to get back to the elevators on your own?” she asks.
“Not sure,” Quinton says. “That’s part of the problem. We’re off the map. At least, my map. But I imagine it’d take me a couple of hours to pick my way through.”
“You don’t sound worried.”
He takes his time answering. “We have extra light and water. We have both of us to go fetch help. I see no reason to worry.”
She reaches into her pack again, feeling blindly for the apples that have been banging around every time she bends down. “I’m guessing we shouldn’t finish off the food just yet?”
“To be safe,” he agrees.
It’s what she expected him to say, but if she were a salamander, she’d eat her own tail right now. She’s as ravenous as she is filthy: Her body’s finally noticed that its tank is empty. Quinton rustles in his own pack before he stretches out, propping his jaw on his hand, legs stretching into the gravel. He sets one tin of corned beef next to her knee and another on his thigh. She hands him an apple and takes the one that’s bruised for herself.
When he bites into his apple, the juice sprays through the smoke of the candle, misting her hand. She’d lick it off if she weren’t so grimy.
“What else you got in there?” he asks, chewing.
Her first bite of the apple is mealy, but the sweetness cuts through the taste of cave on her tongue.
“A sack of dried apples,” she says. “A few strips of fatback that Ruby insisted on sending.”
He picks at a piece of peel between his front teeth. “Can’t eat pork. I worked in a slaughterhouse in Cincinnati, and it put me off for good.”
“Yeah? I’ve never been further north than Louisville. Or further south than Birmingham, except for the beach once.” She leans against the wall. “They had stingrays.”
“You get stung?”
“No,” she says. “And they could have been some other kind of rays. But you could see them moving through the waves. Formations, like birds.”
“Well, you didn’t miss much in Cincinnati,” he says.
She twists the stem of her apple until it snaps off, and she tosses it over her shoulder. Maybe it will bring them luck, like a pinch of salt.
“Why’d you go there?” she asks.
He’s gnawed the apple so close to the core that it looks like a mushroom. His knuckles are swollen.
“I had a cousin up there,” he says. “My father had died, and I thought I wanted something new. I wound up sleeping in a park. At twenty-two, you don’t believe it’s possible you can starve to death, but I gave it my best shot.”
She tries to imagine him frail. She tries to imagine him young.
She’s missed listening to stories that she hasn’t heard. She and Ruby know all the layers of each other by now, and she had that with Gerald, too, of course, knew he had a pet squirrel as a child and his favorite aunt was divorced and he broke his arm when he fell off that horse in a patch of asparagus. If she had a daughter, she would tell her to marry a man whose stories were still fascinating the second or third time because marriage means hearing those stories for the rest of your life.
“I do wish you had more of that macaroni,” Quinton says.
She smiles. “I’d like me another salamander skeleton, if we’re placing orders.”
He tips his head and tosses his apple core.
“Did you swim in the ocean?” he asks.
“I did.”
“You weren’t scared of being stung by rays?”
“They swam away from me every time I tried to get close,” she says.
She can’t remember, actually, if she was scared. She likes to think she wasn’t. With him listening, she gets to build herself, bit by bit, just as he does.
The candlelight barely circles them. His toes have dropped into the darkness.
“Might as well rest a little,” he says. “Seems like they’re taking their time.”
He flops over so he’s flat on the ground, jamming one of the folded blankets under his head. Ada watches him for a moment, then slides off her boots. She strips her socks off, too, and the pleasure of bare feet makes her head fall back. She rolls her jacket into a pillow, folding up the sleeves like her father once taught her, and spreads the other blanket over herself. As soon as she’s horizontal, the exhaustion hits her as strongly as the hunger did earlier. Surely there’s no way they can fall asleep on solid rock.
“Your feet don’t get cold?” Quinton asks.
She’s kicked them out from under the blanket, as she always does. She doesn’t even open her eyes.
“They’re always hot,” she says. “I can’t stand to have them covered.”
It took Gerald a year of marriage to notice this about her, and this man has discovered it within a day.
She drifts off, maybe. She has a dream or a memory of eating blackberry cobbler, her mother’s hand smoothing back her hair so it doesn’t get juice in it, but somehow her entire face is filthy, and then she knows she’s awake—she can feel the rock beneath her—her eyes are open—but she can’t see anything. The darkness has gobbled up their circle of light.
The candle’s gone out, and her first thought is that it’s burned all the way down and hours have passed. She can feel the shadow going down her throat as she takes a breath, like she’s gone back to the beginning of time, when the earth was without form and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and if the darkness is turning solid, she is doing the opposite. She can feel her body evaporating, and maybe this is what death is like.
Quinton’s knee bumps against hers, and she takes form again.
“Damn it,” he says. “I think it blew out when I rolled over.”
She feels him shifting and hears the strike of a match a split second before she sees the flame. She could have done that, she realizes, but she was too wrapped up in the dark.
Quinton is only disconnected angles of fingers and wrist and jaw as he reaches for the candle, still cursing softly under his breath as he lights it. The candle isn’t noticeably shorter than it was when she closed her eyes, so they’ve lost only minutes, not hours. The room takes shape again around them, and they begin to settle back into the known world.
She’s still adjusting to the light when she hears the footsteps—it takes her five or six crunches of gravel to understand that’s what they are, and by that time a flashlight beam is skimming from the chamber floor to ceiling. It catches her briefly in the eyes just as Quinton pushes to his feet. Someone is climbing the wall from the lower chamber. Boots scrabble against limestone, and a lanky figure comes into view.
Talmadge.
He makes his way toward them, squatting near their feet, his flashlight now aimed at the floor. His eyes flick to her briefly before settling on Quinton, and the candlelight shifts across his face.
“I’m done,” he says. “You take ’em.”
He does not sound as if he’s joking. Ada can actually hear Quinton’s tongue slick over his teeth.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asks.
“Just what I said,” Talmadge says, rubbing his wrist. He takes his time, like a genie might pop out if he keeps up the friction long enough. “You can get them back home. Just keep on and you’ll wind up back at that damn waterfall. I’m gonna head out.”
He stands, turning.
“Sit your butt back down and tell me what’s happened,” Quinton commands.
“What hasn’t happened?” Talmadge says. He isn’t sitting down, but at least he’s not leaving. “Hagathorn’s already walked right past the hatpin, no magic vibrations at all. He got stuck in a crack and scraped himself up bad. He won’t turn back. And now he’s had some sort of fit and smashed his knees. I’m giving the blood a chance to clot up and hoping the break will let everybody get their heads on straighter.”
Ada tries to sort through all of it.
“He had a seizure?” she asks.
Talmadge lets out a gust of breath. “He’d call it a vision.”
“How bad is he bleeding?” Quinton asks.
Talmadge’s fingers open and close around his flashlight. “Not too bad. I wrapped him up, not that he appreciated it. He’s blaming everything on me and Morris. Says we didn’t do our job properly.”
“Did you do your job properly?” asks Quinton.
“Every step of the way.”
“Then stop talking crazy and get back in there,” Quinton says. “Get them moving. Make sure that man winds up staring straight at the hatpin and dot your i’s and cross your t’s and finish the thing! Because if you don’t, Leo might never send you down here again.”
Even though the rock eats up sound, Ada wonders how much their voices are carrying.
“The reporter says I’ll lose my job anyway,” Talmadge says, quietly enough. “He says I’m no better than Hagathorn. I cannot lose my job, Quint.”
