dredge. He signaled us a couple of times, but then he stopped. Is he with you?”
Arlis felt the pain in his head sharpen and he winced before saying, “Doc’s fine, don’t worry about him. Where’s the boy?”
Tomlinson’s face disappeared and Will Chaser’s face suddenly filled the little opening. The teen was grinning, but he sounded irritable when he said, “I’ve been digging at this hole for more than an hour! We’ve got nothing but one knife, and both our lights went out.” The boy’s grin widened. “Man! Never thought I’d say this, but it sure is good to see a bossy old redneck.”
Arlis laughed, feeling ridiculously close to tears. “I’ve got a tire iron—watch your eyes, and I’ll try to dig my way through.”
Will shouted, “No! You need a shovel and maybe a pickax. These goddamn roots are hard as iron.”
The boy had a mouth on him, and Arlis knew that he would soon be asking for Ford’s opinion. “I’ll do it my way, if you don’t mind,” he told Will Chaser. “Move aside or this bossy old redneck won’t rescue your mouthy young ass.”
Arlis thought for a moment and then said again, “And keep your voices down. This cave’s got an echo to it.”
The lake was on the other side of the swamp, less than a hundred yards away, and the punk killers might hear them. But he was also still thinking of that snake. If the thing had hatched eggs in the cave, it would be back.
“Why? What’s the problem with making a little noise?” the boy asked, sounding more suspicious than respectful.
Still whispering, Arlis said, “Just do it.”
Because of the bayonet plants—they were as sharp and hard as darts—Arlis was bleeding from puncture wounds on his arms and hands when he lowered himself into the cave. The space was less than five feet high, ceiling to floor, but it was wide and long, counting the pool of water at the far end of the chamber.
Arlis kept his eye on the pool, thinking,
It wasn’t unusual in Florida for lakes to be connected by underground rivers or karst tunnels, as the man was aware. A good example was a sinkhole called Deep Lake, which wasn’t far from Copeland, off Highway 27, on the way to Everglades City. Every spring, ocean-going tarpon appeared in that little lake, rolling on the surface. By fall, they were gone—the fish had followed a tunnel or underground river back to the Gulf of Mexico, twenty-some miles away, to spawn. Arlis had witnessed it with his own eyes long ago when he was a boy, although it was the rare Yankee fisherman who actually believed the story.
Arlis stood there for a second, his mind playing tug-of-war with his courage. He thought,
Then he thought,
The man took a big breath, then ducked headfirst into the cave and began to shimmy his way through a curtain of tree roots. The floor was greasy slick with mud and moss, and there was no avoiding the bones, which rolled and levered beneath his feet. Twice, his boots nearly went out from under him, so he got down on his hands and knees and crawled in the muck. Crawling was easier here—no wonder the snake had chosen it as a good place to hatch its young.
As Arlis worked his way closer, Tomlinson and the boy took turns watching him. The hole was big enough to provide them both air, but just barely. The boy didn’t say much, but Tomlinson was even more hyperactive than usual, and he talked nonstop when it was his turn to push his face into the hole.
Arlis had noticed that reaction before in men who had come close to dying, and a thought came into his head.
Tomlinson yammered away until the light must have hit Arlis’s face just right, which caused the hippie to pause, and then he said in a soft voice, “My God, Arlis, what happened to your face?”
Arlis hadn’t thought about what he must look like, but he knew that his left eye was almost swollen shut and the skin of his jaw was puffy tight with bruising and blood. It was embarrassing, in a way—Arlis had never been beaten so badly by another man, and he hated to lie about it but did. “I took a spill back there on the rocks. Probably because I’m not used to roaming around the woods at night clean sober, but here I am. So don’t worry about it.”
Still concerned, Tomlinson said, “Man . . . you need a doctor.” But then he sensed the old man’s embarrassment and recovered by adding, “I’ll buy us a twelve-pack on the way home. It’s important to stay hydrated down here in the tropics—a few beers will make us both feel better.”
Arlis was having trouble getting through the roots. Every few feet, he had to stop and whack at them with the tire iron before proceeding. During the pauses, Tomlinson continued to talk away, telling Arlis about the series of underwater landslides that had buried them and how they’d ended up here, several hundred feet from the lake. Of course, the hippie also repeatedly asked questions about Ford, which Arlis found disconcerting. He didn’t mind exaggerating a story—that’s the way stories were meant to be told—but he had seldom told so many outright lies in the space of only a few minutes.
To get Tomlinson off the subject, Arlis said, “Once you’re out of here, you can ask Doc your own self how he’s doin’. But right now, let’s focus on the best way to get this job done.” He shined the flashlight toward the eastern wall.
“There’s a pool of water there. See it?”
Tomlinson squeezed his face tighter against the rock hole before saying, “Not from this angle. Is it under the petroglyphs? I can only see part of the floor from here.”
Arlis said, “Petro-what?,” but then realized the man was speaking of the cave drawings on the wall. There was a bizarre-looking stick figure of a man with horns and what might have been a sun and a moon, plus a lot of other scratching.
Arlis had no interest in archaeology, but the stone drawings gave him an uneasy sensation in his belly. It was bad enough to be crawling around in a snake den where there were bones and chewed-on cow skulls, but the witchy-looking images gave him the feeling that the cave would be a dark place no matter how many flashlights a man brought along. The Indian mounds along the Gulf Coast all had this same heavy feel to them, full of shadows and weight, even at high noon.
“Jesus Christ,” Arlis said, “I mighta known a man like you would end up in a weird place like this.”
“Don’t blame me,” Tomlinson replied. “Will gets all the credit for this one. He’s on a journey, man. Will’s a shaman, he doesn’t even know it. His ancestors have something big planned for the kid, which I can explain later if you want. That’s why we ended up here.”
Arlis heard the kid say something sharp to Tomlinson about kicking his ass, but Arlis put an end to it by raising his voice, saying, “There’s a water hole there, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. An opening in the limestone wide enough for you to crawl out. Shut up long enough for me to make my point, if you don’t mind.”
Tomlinson shot back, “I’m only trying to help. Shallow-up, Arlis.”
Squeezing his way between two roots, only a few yards from the hole now, Arlis replied, “We don’t have time for you to help. Just be quiet and listen to what I’m saying! There’s a bigger opening in the floor of this dungeon. It’s right over there, no more than ten or twelve feet from where you are. I’m thinking the crevice you followed might be linked to this hole I’m looking at. Are you with me so far?”
Tomlinson said, “Sorry . . . I get excited. This has been God’s own hell broth of a day, man. We’ve been time-traveling, Arlis, our asses on the line the whole time. It has been one continual monkey-fuck after another, but—”
“Quiet until I finish!” Arlis told him. “I can chop away at those roots, dig your hole wider and get you out. But all I got is this tire iron. It might be a lot easier for you to swim underwater to the next hole and climb out on your own.”
Tomlinson sounded dubious, saying, “I don’t know, man. I’ve had just about enough of swimming around in the dark.”
