“That sound you hear is the wheels turnin inside my head, wonderin what the fuck happened to you. Was you met upon by some horrific occurrence?”
One squeeze.
“Somebody hurt you three years ago.”
One squeeze.
“A man?”
Squeeze.
“Cocksuckers, all. Was you a whore?”
Two squeezes.
“This the work a your husband or—”
One squeeze.
“Lemme venture a guess. . . . He caught you steppin out?”
“Two squeezes.”
“Well, as our mode a communication would take about four fuckin centuries to unriddle this mystery, I’ll leave it at this. You’re a sweet human bein and for whatever reason you caught a rough shake, and I’m real sorry and I wish it hadn’t . . .”
The ceiling glowed, both women gasping as the moon edged into view, nearly full and faintly yellowed, the color of ancient paper, their rocky prison shellacked with placid light.
“I shit you not, this is the first piece a luck I ever had.”
The moon’s brief framing in the chimney window ended, and it shrank away, continuing along its predestined path across the sky, stranding them once more in darkness.
Joss held the shadowgee above their heads and stared at the ceiling.
“You lift me, I believe I can scramble up that. Squat down.”
Lana knelt and Joss straddled her shoulders.
“All right, raise me up slow like.”
Lana stood, surprised by how light Joss was—barely a hundred pounds—and the weight soon lifted off her shoulders.
Joss began to climb, holding the shadowgee in her teeth, clawing her way up the rock, the candlelight dwindling.
Lana glanced around at the darkness on all sides.
“Fuck!” Joss had stopped, perched fifteen feet up the chimney, muttering to herself. Then she was moving again, but coming back down, the room re-warming with candlelight.
Her legs dangled through the bottom of the chimney.
She dropped to the floor, took the shadowgee out of her mouth, said, “Look here, Lana. Only one of us can go up. I want you to.”
Lana shook her head.
“No? Wanna know what you got in store if you stay here? Whoever climbs up that chimney’s gotta have the shadowgee to see, ’cause you can’t hold no candle in your teeth. I’ll leave you with three candles and two matches. No matter what happens, I’d say it’s a long chance I ever make it back to this room, which means you gotta find the mine again, where everyone else is at. Your candle has the luxury a blowin out twice. After that, you might as well sit down and wait to die, in darkness and quiet like you never seen, and all alone, just you and your thoughts. Me? I’d much prefer to take my chances with whatever’s on the bright end a this hole.”
Lana shook her head, her chin twitching.
“I ain’t lockin horns with you on this. You know enough about me to know I operate on the smoky end a the spectrum, so this ain’t no easy offer to make. I would suggest you take me up on it ’fore the notcher in me rethinks the situation.”
Lana pointed at Joss and turned her hands over, palms up.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve always survived. I’ll get myself out a this, jam the breeze back to everyone else. Look, I done plenty a awful things, and not many of ’em ever keep me up nights, but leavin you here in the dark ain’t somethin I care to haul around in my head, pokin at what few shreds a conscience I still possess. Savvy?”
She handed Lana the shadowgee and tied up her wavy black hair.
“Now I’m squattin down now, and I better feel your fuckin heft on my shoulders.”
2009
SIXTY-NINE
I
t was more snow than Abigail had seen in her lifetime—waist-deep and still dumping. With the headlamp on, her visibility ended after ten feet. Without it, the world lay as dark as the cave she’d crawled out of.
Her options whittled to climb or go down, she chose to descend, and between the twelve-thousand-foot oxygen-deprived air and the energy it took to walk without snowshoes in a meter of powder, she had to stop every
