Blind Descent Page 7

  If the words were true, just as Frieda had said, no psychological voodoo involved, then one of these individuals radiating sympathy and love had pushed a rock on her. Unfortunately, in a place as rigidly controlled and inaccessible as the bowels of Lechuguilla, the last-minute solution of the wandering hobo with homicidal tendencies was unworkable.

  “We haven’t met,” Anna said to half the group, wanting to hear their voices, feel the clasp of their hands, in hopes a sense of their trustworthiness would be communicated.

  “Sondra McCarty,” Zeddie said, adopting the hostess role. McCarty’s wife was braiding her hair with both hands, a thick cloth-covered band held ready in her teeth. Anna got neither a voice nor a handshake but merely a grunt and a nod.

  Zeddie went around the circle. “Dr. Curtis Schatz.” The big man with the furry chin looked up from where he sat. His eyes were obscured by glasses framed in mock tortoiseshell. The lenses caught the light and reflected back blank space.

  “Hello,” he said in a flat voice that gave absolutely nothing away and left Anna feeling snubbed.

  “Two doctors,” she said just to say something. “That’s lucky.”

  “Not really,” Schatz drawled, but without Holden’s Texas warmth. A “Tennis, anyone?” effeteness lent his words a snobbish air. “I’m a doctor of leisure and recreation.”

  Anna laughed, realized it was not a joke, and laughed again. “Sorry,” she said.

  “No problem.” Schatz returned to his coffee. Again no handshake. Near the center of the earth, life tended toward the informal.

  “Curt’s a professor of leisure and recreational studies—park planning stuff—with a state university in New York.” Zeddie came to Anna’s rescue with the biographical details. “He’s sketching this trip.”

  Anna remembered Oscar discussing survey team responsibilities. Always, when mapping, besides measuring distances and surveying angles, someone sketched the rooms, the landmarks, the passageways, formations, fossils, and anything else of interest they could squeeze in. Depending on the sketch artist, the drawings varied from stick-like cartoon pictures that documented where an object was and its rough shape, to things of beauty in and of themselves.

  “This is Brent Roxbury.” Zeddie introduced the last of the strangers as if they’d not already raked him over the coals for his sartorial inelegance.

  Brent did shake hands. His grip was firm and dry, as apparently sincere as his asking after Frieda’s health.

  “Brent’s a geologist,” Frieda said. “He teaches and does a lot of work for the Park Service and the BLM.”

  Sondra had finished her hair. She pushed forward and stuck out her hand. “I’m a freelance writer,” she said. The gesture, belated, and the announcement were out of place. Anna wasn’t put off by it. Though she couldn’t remember exactly when or why, she knew there’d been a time when she was younger that she’d felt as she imagined Sondra was feeling: ignored, undervalued, outclassed. Her husband was a doctor. He was probably fifteen years her senior. It had to be a hard act to follow. Anna took the proffered hand. The woman’s grip was hard, competitive. Anna resisted an impulse to shriek and sink to her knees in exaggerated pain.

  “I write travel and adventure articles for the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch and travel magazines in America and Great Britain.” Her credentials and résumé complete, she dropped Anna’s hand.

  At a loss for an appropriate response, Anna mumbled, “How do you do?” and left it at that.

  Holden was pinching his wrist, pressing the minuscule button on the side of his watch. In the ubiquitous gloom even the green glow of a Timex night-light shone vividly. It was 6:23—A.M., Anna assumed. There was no way of knowing, but her body suggested she’d gotten four hours’ sleep, not sixteen. In an hour or less, the team that followed, bringing gear and rigging, should arrive. This would be one of the last times this group would be alone together. As soon as the others came, the machinery of the rescue effort would fall in place and they would be swept up in the momentum.

  It was on the tip of Anna’s tongue to ask what had happened, how Frieda had come to be hurt, when Holden said, “Okay, before the world starts happening to us, let’s go over what we’re going to need. Just us chickens. Everybody else is extra.”

  Anna was just as glad her question had been preempted. It was too late to catch the perpetrator—if there was a perpetrator—off guard. Everyone had ample time to perfect a story. But, had she asked, an official version would have been created by the simple expedient of publicly relating it. Hearing five unofficial versions might prove more enlightening.

  Holden spoke just loud enough that one could hear if silence and attention were maintained. When Anna’d been in high school it had been one of Sister Mary Corrine’s favorite techniques. Thirty years later and seven hundred feet underground, it still worked. They hung on Holden’s every word. Three things were paramount: speed, care of the patient, and care of the cave. The rescuers would keep to the trails even when it made things more difficult. On Tillman’s watch not a single aragonite crystal was to be sacrificed. Looking at each in turn, he told them their duties.

  Anna and Sondra were ladies-in-waiting. Their task was to see to Frieda, make sure she was comfortable and secure, calm her if she became agitated, let Holden know if she needed to rest. Peter was to focus on Frieda’s health, commission any help he needed with drugs, dressings, and services, monitor her vital signs, and keep Holden apprised.

  Curt was given the task of carrying heavy objects. “Born to sherp,” he said with a resignation that made Anna laugh. Zeddie was to carry packs and water. There would be others to help her, Holden promised, but it was her job to see that the core group—the eight of them—had what they needed during the carry-out and at the next camp. Holden estimated they could evacuate Frieda in approximately forty-eight hours; two twenty-hour days broken by an eight-hour sleep. Cavers from outside—and by this he meant anyone not in what he had chosen to call the core group—would bring in food, rigging, water, and medical supplies. There were people to lay phone line, prerig major obstacles at the Rift, the Boulder, and the entrance, and do liaison work and requisitioning. Cavers would be assigned to carry the Stokes when needed, and would cart out garbage and derig the hauls behind the evacuation party.

  At rests and in camp they would segregate themselves. Those outsiders who could or wished to would rotate to the surface to be replaced by fresher, rested people. Holden wanted Frieda to be surrounded by people she knew. He wanted to keep her trauma and stimulation to a minimum.

  For Frieda’s peace of mind, Anna would be rigged with her on all the hauls, traveling up with the Stokes. When hands-on carrying of the litter was not required, only Anna, Dr. McCarty, and Sondra would be allowed near her. Holden didn’t want Frieda swamped with good intentions.

  Anna listened with a growing sense of confidence. She could feel it spreading through the group. When she could get a moment alone with Holden or Oscar, she would tell them of Frieda’s assertion that her injury was not accidental. Till then, the arrangement that kept her near Frieda and most others away was tailor-made for her needs.

  Lights flashed from the far end of Tinker’s Hell. The cavalry had arrived, and the meeting broke up. Sondra McCarty waylaid Anna as she walked back to where Frieda lay.

  “Ladies-in-waiting,” she said, her voice dripping with conspiratorial scorn. “That man’s a dinosaur from the pregnant-and-barefoot school. Doesn’t he think we’re fit for men’s work?”

  Anna was dumbstruck. For ten years she’d made a living doing what was traditionally considered men’s work. Being a lady-in-waiting required more courage and stamina than she’d ever bargained for. “Hey,” she said when her silence had grown too long to be considered polite. “It’s a job.”

  “Yeah. Well. For you, maybe,” Sondra said, and Anna knew she’d been written off as hopelessly bourgeois.

  A team of twelve cavers rattled into camp, bringing a raucous confusion of light and sound. Pa
cks were dumped and fallen upon, their innards jerked forth for inspection. Peter McCarty was handed a bundle earmarked for patient care. He tucked it under his arm and made a beeline for his patient. Until Anna knew for sure what had harmed Frieda, she didn’t intend to let anyone mess with her unobserved, not even her private physician.

  “And good morning to you,” McCarty said as Anna joined him. With his good looks and instant attentiveness, she could guess part of his wife’s problem. The man was a natural flirt. Or a habitual one. She doubted he meant anything by it; the response had just become ingrained into his patterns. Squatting on Frieda’s other side, she trained her headlamp not on the doctor’s face but on his hands.

  “Frieda,” he said, “Anna and I are going to fit you up with a catheter so you don’t have to go traipsing off to the loo. It will be a wee bit uncomfortable for just a minute.” His voice was reassuringly conversational. Anna would have liked to have absolute faith in the man, but it was a luxury Frieda couldn’t afford.

  Together they cut away the injured woman’s trousers. They were lined with soiled toilet tissue, a homemade diaper the doctor had taken care to provide till his equipment arrived. At each step in the procedure, Peter explained what he was doing, dividing his remarks between Anna and the unconscious Frieda. His hands were ungraceful-looking, the nails chewed down to the quick, but his movements were sure and gentle.

  When the catheter was in place, McCarty pulled an oversized handkerchief from his hip pocket and shook out the square of cotton. A baseball was printed in the middle, the words “I do believe in the Twins, I do!” stenciled in a semicircle around it. “Not exactly sterile,” he said, “but clean and unbesnotted.” Draping it carefully over Frieda’s lap, he secured it with safety pins to preserve her dignity.

  Their patient was settled, as comfortable as they could make her. McCarty began gathering up his supplies, and Anna asked him how the accident had happened. Her light was on his face now to see if muscles might betray something voice had been schooled not to. Watching for lies was a professional habit and, though Anna was a fairly decent practitioner of the art, she had learned not to count on it overmuch. Some liars were just too good, some honest people just naturally twitchy. Still, it was a place to begin.

  McCarty glanced over his shoulder. The move was not precisely furtive; maybe he was only judging the time left till they moved Frieda out. Anna had noted that quick, unfocused glance before. It was the one crack in his armor of charm. Though seemingly attentive, one sensed he checked to see if anyone more interesting was in the room before committing his time.

  Either Anna won, or she’d imagined the game; McCarty turned back to her.

  “Nobody knows for sure,” he said. “Possibly not even Frieda. The brain has a way of protecting us from memories that are too painful to be relived.”

  “Did anyone see it happen?”

  “Nope. We’d split up to explore possible leads out of Tinker’s. Most of us were fairly close to camp. Brent thought he had a going lead in the upper quadrant. There.” McCarty picked up his hard hat, switched on the lamp and used it to point out a crack seventy or eighty feet up the back wall. “He and Curt climbed to that ledge. Brent went inside. Curt waited on the ledge, sketching. Sondra was photographing a broken formation. Zeddie and I had been pushing a lead behind that mountain of breakdown.” Again he used the light to point. The vastness of the chamber swallowed the beam before it reached its objective.

  “So you were with Zeddie. Who found Frieda?”

  “No. It got kind of squirrelly. Our lead petered out. Zeddie was headed back to camp and I was going to collect Sondra when I heard a yell—high, like a bird or a stepped-on cat. There was no way to tell where it came from, but it sounded enough like a cry for help that I think everybody pretty much started trying to get to wherever they thought it was. We ran around like the proverbial headless chickens. Then we all started shouting at each other, so if Frieda called a second time there was no way to sort it out from the general hubbub.

  “Zeddie was the one who found her. She’d known where Frieda was going. Neither of them thought the lead had much promise, it wasn’t blowing to speak of, but if you don’t check them all out, you know the one you skipped leads to the bottom of the world and the next guy is going to find it.

  “Frieda was in a crawl space, vertical, mostly breakdown—unstable stuff. Zeddie had gone down twenty feet and could just see Frieda’s head. A rock the size of a basketball but pointy on one end had lodged between Frieda and the side of the passage. The weight rested on her shoulder, wedging her in.

  “Zeddie got down as far as she could, squatted over Frieda, and lifted the rock straight up. Talk about clean and jerk! Zeddie’s no slouch in the weight-lifting department. She pushed it up over her head. Curt and I got hold of it and brought it the rest of the way. It was a good forty pounds. Frieda’s lucky it didn’t crush her skull or break her collarbone.”

  “Curt was there when you got there?”

  “No. Wait. Yes. He was trying to get Zeddie to let him go after the rock.”

  “So Zeddie pulled Frieda out?”

  “No. That was a group effort. I doubt even the amazing Zeddie could lift a hundred and forty pounds of dead weight straight up. She got out, and I went down and got a cervical collar on Frieda. We tried to be careful, but you know how it is. For all the protection we could give her spinal column we might as well have hooked a tow chain under her armpits and yanked her out with a backhoe.

  “It was lucky she was unconscious. We didn’t know her leg was broken till we had her out where I could get a look. The pain would have been horrific.”

  “Frieda never said what happened? Wasn’t she conscious at first?”

  “Her level of consciousness wasn’t stable. She knew who we were but not where she was or what had happened. As near as we could guess, she was climbing down and loosened some rocks as she went by. When she was below them, they broke loose. The first one hit her right leg at the knee and sheared off the top of the tibia. That must have been when she called for help. Then the second rock hit her in the head.

  “Guesswork, but informed guesswork,” he said with a laugh. “That’s a doctor’s bread and butter.”

  Having finished with the story and clearing up the medical paraphernalia, he stood, unfolding with the ease of a dancer. “When we get you tucked up snug in the Stokes,” he said to Frieda, “I’ll get you on an IV to keep your fluids up.”

  Anna didn’t know whether Frieda had gotten Peter’s message, but she had: keep talking. There was no way of telling what got through to Frieda, but all possible lines must be used to tether her to this world when temptation urged her to wander into the next.

  Since Anna hadn’t bothered unpacking so much as a change of socks the night before, she had nothing to do for the moment. Sitting near Frieda’s head, she took her friend’s hand between her own. “I know, I know, I’d never dare take such a liberty if you were awake,” she said as she pressed her friend’s fingers. “But, hey, there’s not much you can do about it, is there? And I don’t know if it comforts you, but it sure soothes the hell out of me. This cave stuff is for the birds. Bats.” For a moment she sat quietly, playing Frieda’s inert fingers against her palm. “Think about this,” she said after a time, talking as much to herself as to her friend. “According to the good doctor, everybody was by themselves, near you, all shrouded in darkness when the rocks fell. Except maybe Brent and Curt. They were together, but I’m not clear exactly how together. This of course narrows things down not one whit. Cogitate upon it and then wake up and tell me all.”

  Frieda moved and made a noise in her throat. Anna held her breath and waited, but Frieda never opened her eyes.

  5

  THINGS HAPPENED FAST and so smoothly that Anna’s estimate of Holden Tillman—already high—went up a notch or two. His quiet authority overlaid strict self-discipline. In another man it might have been abrasive, but Tillman created the illusion that he had time
for everyone, an ear for every concern. In addition to a gentle, self-effacing humor, his manner provided the lubricant that allowed a disparate collection of people to operate with singleness of purpose.

  Anna and Peter packaged Frieda Dierkz. She was strapped snugly in the Stokes, her hands crossed on her chest and lashed in place with soft bandages. A helmet with a Plexiglas face shield was fitted over her head and a stirrup beneath her left foot so, should she become able at some point, she could keep the weight off her injured leg when the litter was tilted. The oxygen bottle was secured between her knees.

  Because of the radical ups and downs of the rubble-strewn path to Tinker’s exit, the standard method of carrying a litter would have subjected Frieda to a bumpy ride. So Holden strung the sixteen people out along the path, and the stretcher was passed between two lines of cavers, eight on a side, moving Frieda from hand to hand in the fashion of a bucket brigade. As the stretcher left a caver’s hands, he or she scrambled ahead, keeping the line always unbroken, always moving forward. In an effort to make her journey as uneventful as possible, the stretcher bearers would stand between stones and pass the Stokes overhead rather than lower Frieda and pull her up again, squat on their haunches on the high ground and keep the Stokes moving levelly a foot or so above the rock.

  The men were as motley a group as one could hope to assemble behind any one cause. One had a gray-shot beard and hair that tangled like Charley Manson’s in his heyday. Another resembled an undergraduate from a conservative midwestern seminary. Various points masculine in between were represented. Most worked shirtless. In the cave’s humidity, exertion brought body heat up. Sweat glistened on bare backs between streaks of dirt. Bound by convention even this far below Emily Post’s basement, the women sweated beside them in tee-shirts and running bras. Lisa was there, her Rapunzel braids looped up under her hard hat, along with two other women Anna had not seen before.