Blind Descent Read online

  Oscar was the first to pay his respects. McCarty, he said, felt duty-bound to tell him and Holden of the change in the patient’s condition. His tone left no doubt that he felt Anna had been remiss, as indeed she had. Extenuating circumstances, she told herself as she squirmed under his reproachful stare.

  In the way of runaway secrets, the tale spread without any traceable source—each person told one other, someone overheard, someone deduced. Within an amazingly short period of time, Frieda’s lucidity went from secret to news.

  As the Stokes was moved up the incline, cavers greeted her, welcomed her back to the world of the living. Never comfortable with subterfuge, Dierkz dropped the pretense and answered as best the pain medication allowed until a squat clean-shaven caver from the outside, boasting EMT status, as if EMTs weren’t a dime a dozen in this crew, got so officious Frieda became anxious. Then Holden asked the rescuers to dispense with their good cheer and let her get what rest she could, given she was being trundled up a steep slope.

  For reasons of his own, which were possibly sinister but more likely intended to save Frieda from embarrassment, Peter McCarty had left the gloved hand and the possible murder attempt out of his report.

  Anna had no idea if this boded good or ill. If someone wanted Frieda dead, perhaps not knowing she was aware of the attack would stay their hand. Then again, maybe if everyone knew, it would discourage a second attempt. The whole thing was too much for Anna’s beleaguered mind; the ravings of a head injury patient and the paranoia of an admitted claustrophobe weren’t much of a basis for a meaningful dialogue with reality.

  Shelving these vague possibilities, she put her back into carrying Frieda home. With each step taken, each rock climbed, they were that much closer to getting out. Left to herself, she knew she would set an underland speed record from Tinker’s to the surface, but even the creeping gait of their human caterpillar was heartening.

  The passage out of Tinker’s closed down so tightly a person couldn’t walk upright. It narrowed until shoulders and hips brushed the sides. Well back on the balcony, between the Stokes and the cavers derigging the first haul, Anna felt fear rise in a freezing tide. To hold it at bay, she busied herself checking every knot, buckle, and hook on the Stokes. The stretcher couldn’t be rigged and hauled through the passage. Given the horizontal as well as vertical twists and turns, it couldn’t be passed from hand to hand. At every step of the way it would require lifting over rockfall, easing across crevices, working under projections of limestone. The stoop-walk in front of them would be impossible to rig; consequently Anna assumed Holden would be a while figuring out the logistics. She planned to use that time to compose herself for an interminable incarceration in a very small space.

  “Everybody listen up,” Holden said, and she felt an icy poke in her innards followed by an irrational anger. Tillman had already worked out the carry. Did the man never sleep?

  The cavers, most of whom were crowded onto the balcony or perched like colorful crows on rocks nearby, fell quiet. Those who weren’t actively engaged in derigging had their headlamps switched off. Holden moved the beam of his light from one face to the next, and they appeared like actors in the spotlight, each with his own bizarre tale to tell before the curtain came down.

  Counting his sheep, Anna realized, and she was put in mind of a long ago and long forgotten Sunday school. Fleetingly, she wondered if Jesus of Wherever counted his apostles with the same half-loving, half-annoyed, totally concerned look, reading people for fatigue, injury, fear—any weakness that could harm them or the cause.

  “This passage is one hundred sixty-two feet long. There are only two rooms big enough to stand up in, and there’re not many flat enough to set the Stokes down. What we’re going to do is turtle it.” Judging by the intrigued looks that flickered from the darkness, “turtling” wasn’t a classic maneuver culled from the most recent edition of the Manual of U.S. Cave Rescue Techniques.

  Deferring often to Frieda to make sure she knew that she was part of her own rescue and not just one hundred forty pounds of packaged meat, Holden talked them through the next leg of the journey. Turtling was evidently a process he’d learned from his predecessor at the BLM. Like many things that worked, it wasn’t in the pages of any how-to book. Though to give credit where credit was due, the few books on cave rescue Anna had looked at agreed that the most important piece of equipment in an underground rescue is the rescuer’s brain.

  One by one Holden sent them into the passage. Half a body length apart, they were to get on hands and knees and pass the Stokes along their backs, a shoulder-wrenching premise, but workable. When Frieda reached the head of the line, the trailing cavers would close ranks like an inch-worm taking up its inch. The litter would be pushed to the last two backs, the leading fourteen would spread out farther up the passage, and Frieda would recommence travel over the soft shells of Holden’s turtles.

  Of necessity, Anna would be separated from her patient. She tried to work up a good case of anxiety over that, but at the moment, she really didn’t care. She was the third turtle sent in. Dr. McCarty and his wife were in front of her, Curt Schatz directly behind. Due to the congestion and the knowledge that large chunks of flesh and bone walled her in fore and aft, the passage felt much tighter than it had when she’d come through eight hours before.

  Eight hours. Anna marveled at the number. On a good night she could sleep that long. In Lechuguilla it seemed a lifetime.

  To have something to think about other than the fact that the walls were going to close in, she wondered if her hair would have turned snow-white by the time she reached daylight, as was reported in old ghost stories. Not that it had that far to go. Since Cumberland Island, when she’d hacked it off short, the gray had become more evident, streaking both temples in the timeless fashion of the Bride of Frankenstein.

  Lechuguilla had been formed in a rather peculiar manner. It hadn’t been carved out by underground rivers as many eastern caves had been. Surface water percolating downward had not dissolved the limestone as Anna once thought. Deep in the petroleum-rich land beneath New Mexico, hydrogen sulphide waters welled up to mix with the fresh water and oxygen at the water table, creating sulphuric acid. The acid ate away the stone. The result was a cave that was formed without the sobering influence of gravity. Corrosive acid burned along cracks and fissures, chewed away the softer places, and created intricate mazes, deep pits, shafts, and crevices that grew away from one another in a dizzying manner.

  The passage Anna and her fellow turtles traversed exhibited this lack of respect for rhyme and reason. In the skittering glow of her headlamp it resembled a seascape rolled in on itself. Stones were pale gray and pitted all over with holes of varying sizes, from the merest pinprick to sockets she could have stored a bowling ball in had she been a bowling ball kind of girl. Nothing had been worn smooth. Edges retained the razor sharpness they’d been honed to in their geological youth, some hundreds of thousands of years before. Rocks as capricious as clouds lowered down from the ceiling. Sharp-edged scythes, rude fingers poked from all directions, forcing her to one side then the other, pushing out at waist level in a dragon’s head daring her to climb over or squeeze beneath. The floor rolled and buckled, spewing up till Anna skittered over on belly and elbows, dropping away in cracks she chose not to consider the depth of. All melded seamlessly together. The effect was exhausting, disorienting. Space-time relations taken for granted aboveground ceased to exist. In the roiling rock-filled chaos, distance couldn’t be measured in feet or miles. Minutes and hours tangled until she felt as stoned as she had a hundred fifty feet below the surface of Lake Superior, suffering from nitrogen narcosis.

  “Nice butt.”

  Curt Schatz’s flat drawl filtered through from behind her. His tone was devoid of lasciviousness, malice, or condescension. She’d never heard the words without one or all of these accouterments. Clearly she’d misheard. She stopped and turned, bending down to push her helmet under a curtain of limestone. “Pard
on?” she murmured politely.

  “Nice butt,” Curt repeated. “I couldn’t help but notice. Since I started caving I’ve become something of an expert. I’ve followed some of the finest butts in the business. Yours is up there. Better than Peter McCarty’s. But don’t tell him I said so. He prides himself on that sort of thing.” He smiled showing small white teeth, perfectly even. In a fairy-tale princess, they might have been described as pearls. Peeking out from his thick beard they lent him the rakish charm of a wolf pup.

  Anna laughed. “Better than Dr. McCarty’s?”

  “Yup,” Schatz said. “And I know Pete’s butt like the face of my own mother.”

  Anna returned to the business of wending her way through New Mexico’s lower intestine, but she felt cheered. No more airspace presented itself. The tonnage between her and the sky remained unchanged. Yet the anxiety squeezing the blood from her veins was momentarily lessened. Where there was humor there was a fighting chance of remaining sane.

  Such were the isolating influences of Lechuguilla’s topography: a turn in a passage, a change in elevation, an upthrust of formations, and all light and sound was cut off. Smaller, more agile, Anna left Curt and was once again as alone as if the earth had buried each of them in their own personal grave.

  Dr. McCarty and Sondra were on the far side of two pincers of rock coming together under a wall of calcite drapery that folded down like velvet curtains to within sixteen inches of the bottom of the passage. Anna recognized the formation as the place she was to stop. The crawl was too tight to pass through except one at a time, but the floor beneath was uncharacteristically flat. Here she was to wait for Frieda to be brought across the backs of her fellows. Anna and Curt would set the Stokes onto the floor and feed it through to the McCartys. They would move it far enough up the passage that the cavers could congregate on the far side of the crawl and the mechanism of the turtle ferry would be started up again.

  Anna sat down, her fanny pleased with the smooth flooring, her body pleased with a rest. Sweat poured down the sides of her face, burned her eyes, and ran in a small river between her breasts. Mixing with the ubiquitous dirt, it formed a streaked layer of mud over skin and clothes. She pulled her helmet off and scratched at tickles creeping through her hair. No doubt this left her locks standing Medusa-like in snaky ire, but she could not have cared less. On some primitive level she was beginning to enjoy being dirty, to see each layer of crud as a testament to her undaunted perseverance. Maybe she’d turn into a caver yet. She switched off her headlamp to test out the idea.

  With the dousing of the light she became aware of a faint play of gold from beyond the crawl space: the McCartys. It was a comfort, and she watched it come and go, wishing Professor Schatz would hurry up. Even discussing the nether parts of Peter’s anatomy was better than sitting alone with only her thoughts for company. A minute more passed in this lonely internment before she flicked her lamp back on and shone it down the way she had come. No sign of life. Perhaps Curt had stopped to wait for the turtle in his wake. Zeddie Dillard, Anna remembered.

  Lamp off again, she sat a few minutes more, drank water, and tried not to think about anything. Without action it proved an impossible task, and she decided to belly down and investigate the crawl so she could better prepare Frieda for the experience when the litter arrived. The space allowed for a lizard-like creep using elbows and knees but little else. Trusting to the McCarty’s light, Anna left her hard hat and lamp behind. From the forced march in, she knew the crawl wasn’t long—maybe eleven feet—then it opened into a small chamber, one of the few places in the tunnel large enough that two or three people could stand upright with some degree of comfort.

  By the time she’d nearly wriggled through, her head a foot or less from the opening to the room, she was able to hear the doctor and his wife. Their voices had the unmistakable pitch of a marital squabble. Unable to resist the puerile temptation to eavesdrop, she lay still and listened.

  “You wanted to be blackmailed,” Sondra was saying heatedly. “And at the same time I thought I loved you.”

  “You don’t now?” The doctor’s voice had lost its bedside bonhomie and rang cold in the closed chamber.

  A pretty darn good fight, Anna thought happily. Anybody else’s troubles had to be a relief from her own.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if I ever did,” Sondra snapped. “I’m sick to death of watching you play doctor, knowing everybody is laughing themselves sick at my expense.”

  “Frieda’s hurt,” McCarty said mildly.

  “You can always manage to make yourself necessary, can’t you? Is there anything you won’t do to make yourself indispensable to women?”

  This was answered by silence, and Anna wished she could see their faces. She pictured anger and resentment on Sondra, maybe touched with that absolute disgust she’d noted earlier. Peter McCarty was harder. Would he look hurt? Reproachful? Arrogant or vain?

  “And maybe I wasn’t talking about Frieda,” Sondra went on when the silence began to lose its power.

  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.”