She finally shoved Neil away. Then she laid her head down in Blossom’s lap. “Drunk,” she scolded sleepily. “Absolutely stoned.” Then she began to snore. In a few minutes, Blossom slept too—and dreamed—and woke with a little cry.
“What is it?” Maryann asked.
“Nothing, a dream,” Blossom said. “Haven’t you gone to sleep yet?”
“I can’t.” Though it was as quiet as death now, Maryann was still listening. What she feared most was that Neil
Buddy woke. It was still dark. It would always be dark now, here. There was a woman beside him, whom he touched, though not to wake her. Assured that she was neither Greta nor Maryann, he gathered his clothes and sidled away. Strands of the sticky pulp caught on his bare back and shoulders and melted there, unpleasantly.
He was still feeling drunk. Drunk and drained. Orville bad a word for the feeling—what was it?
Detumescent.
The grainy liquid trickled down his bare skin, made him shiver. But it wasn’t that he was cold. Though he was cold, come to think of it.
Crawling forward on hands and knees, he bumbled into another sleeping couple. “Wha?” the woman said. She sounded like Greta. No matter. He crawled elsewhere.
He found a spot where the pulp had not been disturbed and shoved his body into it backward. Once you got used to the sticky feeling, it was quite comfortable: soft, warm, snuggly.
He wanted light: sunlight, lamplight, even the red, unsteady light of last night’s burning. Something in the present situation horrified him in a way he did not understand, could not define. It was more than the darkness. He thought about it and as he dropped off to sleep again it came to him:
Worms.
They were worms, crawling through an apple.
TEN
Falling to Pieces
“Who’s
“Audrey Hepburn. I only saw her in one movie—when I was nine years old—but she was wonderful in that. Then there weren’t any more movies. Daddy never approved, I guess.”
“Daddy!” Greta snorted. She tore off a strand of fruit pulp from the space overhead, lowered it lazily into her mouth, mashed it with her tongue against the back of her teeth. Sitting in that pitch-black cavity in the fruit, her listeners could not see her do this, but it was evident from her blurred speech that she was eating again. “And you, Neil? Who’s your favorite?’
“Charlton Heston. I used to go to anything with him in it.”
“Me too,” said Clay Kestner. “Him—and how about Marilyn
“Marilyn Monroe was vastly overrated in my opinion,” Greta mouthed.
“What do you say about that, Buddy? Hey, Buddy! Is he still here?”
“Yeah, I’m still here. I never saw Marilyn Monroe. She was before my time.”
“Oh, you missed something, kid. You really missed something.”
“
“And you still say Charlton Heston’s your favorite?” Clay Kestner had a booming, traveling-salesman’s laugh, gutsy and graceless. In former years he had been half-owner of a filling station.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Neil said nervously.
Greta laughed too, for Clay had begun to tickle her toes. “You’re all wet, all of you,” she said, still giggling but trying to stop. “I still say that Kim Novak is the greatest actress who ever lived.” She had been saying it and saying it for fifteen minutes, and it seemed now that she would say it again.
Buddy was mortally bored. He had thought it would be better to stay behind with the younger set than to go along on another of his father’s tedious, purposeless explorations through the labyrinthine roots of the Plants. Now that the supplies had been gathered in, now that they had learned everything about the Plant that there was to learn, there was no point in wandering about. And no point in sitting still. He had not realized till now, till there was nothing to do, what a slave to work and Puritan busy-ness he had become.
He rose, and his hair (cut short now, like everyone else’s) brushed against the clinging fruit. The fruit pulp, when it dried and matted in one’s hair, was more aggravating than a mosquito bite that couldn’t be itched.
“Where are you going?” Greta asked, offended that her audience should desert her in the middle of hen analysis of Kim Novak’s peculiar charm.
“I’ve got to throw up,” Buddy said. “See you all later.”
It was a plausible enough excuse. The fruit, though it nourished them, had minor side effects. They were all, a month later (such was the estimate on which they had agreed), still suffering from diarrhea, gas pains and bellyaches. Buddy almost might have wished he did have to vomit: it would have been something to do.
Worse than the stomach upsets had been the colds. Nearly everyone had suffered from these too, and there had been no remedy but patience, sleep and a will to recover. In most cases these remedies were sufficient, but three cases of pneumonia had developed, Denny Stromberg among them. Alice Nemerov did what she could do, but as she was the first to confess, she could do nothing.
Buddy climbed up the rope from the tuber into the root proper. Here he had to walk crouched, for the hollow space in the root was only four and a half feet in diameter. Bit by bit over the last month, the party had moved down many hundreds of feet—to a depth, Orville had estimated, of at least 1,200 feet. Why, the Alworth Building wasn’t that high. Not even the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis! At this depth the temperature was a relaxed seventy degrees.
There was a rustling sound close ahead. “Who’s that?” Buddy and Maryann asked, almost in unison.
“What are you doing here?” Buddy asked his wife in a surly tone.
“Making more rope—but don’t ask me why. It’s just something to do. It keeps me busy. I’ve shredded up some of the vines, and now I’m putting them back together.” She laughed weakly. “The vines were probably stronger than my ropes.”
“Here, take my hands—show them how to do it.”
“You!” When Buddy’s hands touched hers, she continued busily knitting so that her fingers would not tremble. “Why would you want to do that?”
“As you say—it’s something to do.”
She began to guide his clumsy fingers but grew confused frying to keep in mind that his right hand was in her left and vice versa. “Maybe if I sat behind you…” she suggested. But as it turned out, she couldn’t even close her arms around his chest. Her belly was in the way.
“How is he?” Buddy asked. “Will it be much longer?”
“He’s fine. It should be any day now.”
It worked out as she had hoped: Buddy sat behind her, his thighs clenched about her spread legs, his hairy arms beneath hers, supporting them like the armrests of a chair. “So teach me,” he said.
He was a slow learner, not used to this kind of work, but his slowness only made him a more interesting pupil. They wore away an hour or more before he was ready to start his own rope. When he had finished it, the fibers fell apart like shreds of tobacco sliding out of a beginner’s cigarette.
From deep inside the tuber came the music of Greta’s laugh, and then Clay’s bass-drum accompaniment. Buddy had no desire to rejoin them. He had no desire to go anywhere except back to the surface, its fresh air, its radiance, its changing seasons.
Maryann apparently was having similar thoughts. “Do you suppose it’s Ground Hog’s Day yet?”
“Oh, I’d say another week. Even if we were up there where we could see whether or not the sun was out, I doubt there’d be any groundhogs left to go looking for their shadows.”
“Then Blossom’s birthday could be today. We should remind her.”
“How old is she now? Thirteen?”
