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 McCartys' 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 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,
'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
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.'
'Turtling!' was shouted down the insulating passage behind them. They buckled on their hard hats, dragged Frieda over three more spines, set the Stokes on the floor, then pushed it through the crawl space to the waiting
