The Cave
RUSSELL HAD QUIT HIS job as a coal miner on his twenty-fifth birthday, though still, five years later, he would occasionally spray flecks of blood when he coughed. But he was as big as a horse, and to look at him no one would ever have guessed that he was not completely healthy.
Sissy knew it, as they had had numerous conversations, increasingly intimate, on their lunch and dinner dates during the last month, though she was keenly aware that there was much about him that she did not know, too. They were traveling a full day’s journey from Mississippi to West Virginia to visit the country where Russell had once worked and to go canoeing there.
Sissy was both excited and nervous; they had left Mississippi long before the sun had risen, and all day she had been filled with the feeling that the day was like a present that was waiting to be unwrapped.
By early afternoon they had passed through Alabama and were up into the foothills of the Appalachians. They drove deeper into the mountains: up craggy canyons and down shady hollows, as if disappearing into the folds of the earth. They passed the leached-out brushfields of revegetated strip mines, as well as the slaughterous new ruins of ongoing ones: big trucks hauling out load after load, pouring out rivers of black diesel smoke from their riddled tailpipes as they thundered wildly down the twisted mountains and then groaned and growled slowly back up the hills.
They got caught behind one such slow-moving caravan, and rather than fight it they pulled over and went for a short walk into the woods. Russell could feel a cool breeze moving through the old forest, and he said that on that breeze he could detect the odors of an abandoned mine.
Sissy did not believe him but went with him looking for it, watching him work into the breeze like a hound, casting laterally until the scent disappeared and then changing directions and casting forward in the opposite direction, zeroing in on whatever odor he was able to discern from all others. Sissy could detect only a faint coolness, no scent, but Russell led them right up to the lip of the old adit, and they stood before it, not seeing it at first, for brush had grown over the opening.
Russell crouched down and parted the leaves, and Sissy saw the dark opening, scarcely wider than a man’s body. She leaned in and felt the breeze issuing from it, cool now against her sweaty face. The mine’s breath stirred the damp tendrils of her hair and carried the faintest hints of sulfur. She wondered if old rocks smelled different from new rocks—as if such things might have changed slightly in the last several hundred million years. She thought possibly she could smell the faintest odor of men, too, and wondered how recently or distantly they might have abandoned this place.
Emerald-bright moss grew around the hole; wild violets formed scattered bouquets, as if someone, or something, had been buried below and was being honored.
“How far down does it go?” Sissy asked.
Russell lay down on his belly and examined the hole. It was barely wider than his shoulders. A yellow butterfly drifted past his face. “There are rungs still hammered into the walls,” he said. “We could climb down and see.”
“Do you think it has a bottom?”
“It has to have a bottom,” he said.
“You go first,” Sissy said. “What do I do if you fall?”
“Crawl back out, and wait for me to climb up,” Russell said.
“Will it be cold or hot down there?” Sissy asked. Russell didn’t answer; he was already lowering himself into the hole. It was a tight squeeze and his hips would not quite fit, so that he was stuck already, half in the earth and half out. He strained there for a moment, then wriggled back out.
“Do you mind if I undress?” he asked.
“No,” said Sissy, and watched as he kicked off his shoes and pulled off his shirt, heavy denim jeans, and finally his underwear.
“Tell me why I should go down here with you?” said Sissy.
“You don’t have to,” he said, easing into the hole.
She paused, then looked around before slipping out of her own clothes—paused again with her bra and underwear, shock white—the light coming down through the green dappling of leaves felt warmer, different, on her bare skin—and then she slipped out of those as well, folded her clothes neatly next to his rumpled pile, and descended.
“You blocked out the light,” he said, from ten feet below.
She looked up. “It’s still there,” she said.
The adit was cool and slick with spring-trickle. The limestone walls were smoothed with years of water-seep, and they felt good against her back and chest. There was not quite room for her to draw her knees up double, and she wondered how Russell could make it, wondered how he had been able to endure his old job, working among men half his size.
Out of nervousness, she wanted to talk as she descended, but it was difficult for him to hear what she was saying; he kept calling “What?” so that she was having to spread her legs and crane her neck and call down to him, as if trying to force the sound waves to sink—like dropping pebbles, she imagined—and in the darkness she could not tell whether he was fifty feet below her or only a few inches. She descended slowly, not wanting to step on his fingers.
Sometimes when she stopped to rest it seemed that the slight curves and tapers of the borehole fit the same curves and tapers of her body, though only in that one resting place; then they would move on, again, descending.
Fantastic paranoias began to
