Blind Descent-pigeion 6 (11 page)

  The cavers, most of whom were crowded onto the balcony or perched like colorful crows on rocks nearby, fell quiet. Those who weren't actively engaged in derigging had their headlamps switched off. Holden moved the beam of his light from one face to the next, and they appeared like actors in the spotlight, each with his own bizarre tale to tell before the curtain came down.

  Counting his sheep, Anna realized, and she was put in mind of a long ago and long forgotten Sunday school. Fleetingly, she wondered if Jesus of Wherever counted his apostles with the same half-loving, half-annoyed, totally concerned look, reading people for fatigue, injury, fear-any weakness that could harm them or the cause.

  "This passage is one hundred sixty-two feet long. There are only two rooms big enough to stand up in, and there're not many flat enough to set the Stokes down. What we're going to do is turtle it." Judging by the intrigued looks that flickered from the darkness, "turtling" wasn't a classic maneuver culled from the most recent edition of the Manual of U.S. Cave Rescue Techniques.

  Deferring often to Frieda to make sure she knew that she was part of her own rescue and not just one hundred forty pounds of packaged meat, Holden talked them through the next leg of the journey. Turtling was evidently a process he'd learned from his predecessor at the BLM. Like many things that worked, it wasn't in the pages of any how-to book. Though to give credit where credit was due, the few books on cave rescue Anna had looked at agreed that the most important piece of equipment in an underground rescue is the rescuer's brain.

  One by one Holden sent them into the passage. Half a body length apart, they were to get on hands and knees and pass the Stokes along their backs, a shoulder-wrenching premise, but workable. When Frieda reached the head of the line, the trailing cavers would close ranks like an inchworm taking up its inch. The litter would be pushed to the last two backs, the leading fourteen would spread out farther up the passage, and Frieda would recommence travel over the soft shells of Holden's turtles.

  Of necessity, Anna would be separated from her patient. She tried to work up a good case of anxiety over that, but at the moment, she really didn't care. She was the third turtle sent in. Dr. McCarty and his wife were in front of her, Curt Schatz directly behind. Due to the congestion and the knowledge that large chunks of flesh and bone walled her in fore and aft, the passage felt much tighter than it had when she'd come through eight hours before.

  Eight hours. Anna marveled at the number. On a good night she could sleep that long. In Lechuguilla it seemed a lifetime.

  To have something to think about other than the fact that the walls were going to close in, she wondered if her hair would have turned snow-white by the time she reached daylight, as was reported in old ghost stories. Not that it had that far to go. Since Cumberland Island, when she'd hacked it off short, the gray had become more evident, streaking both temples in the timeless fashion of the Bride of Frankenstein.

  Lechuguilla had been formed in a rather peculiar manner. It hadn't been carved out by underground rivers as many eastern caves had been. Surface water percolating downward had not dissolved the limestone as Anna once thought. Deep in the petroleum-rich land beneath New Mexico, hydrogen sulphide waters welled up to mix with the fresh water and oxygen at the water table, creating sulphuric acid. The acid ate away the stone. The result was a cave that was formed without the sobering influence of gravity. Corrosive acid burned along cracks and fissures, chewed away the softer places, and created intricate mazes, deep pits, shafts, and crevices that grew away from one another in a dizzying manner.

  The passage Anna and her fellow turtles traversed exhibited this lack of respect for rhyme and reason. In the skittering glow of her headlamp it resembled a seascape rolled in on itself. Stones were pale gray and pitted all over with holes of varying sizes, from the merest pinprick to sockets she could have stored a bowling ball in had she been a bowling ball kind of girl. Nothing had been worn smooth. Edges retained the razor sharpness they'd been honed to in their geological youth, some hundreds of thousands of years before. Rocks as capricious as clouds lowered down from the ceiling. Sharp-edged scythes, rude fingers poked from all directions, forcing her to one side then the other, pushing out at waist level in a dragon's head daring her to climb over or squeeze beneath. The floor rolled and buckled, spewing up till Anna skittered over on belly and elbows, dropping away in cracks she chose not to consider the depth of. All melded seamlessly together. The effect was exhausting, disorienting. Space-time relations taken for granted aboveground ceased to exist. In the roiling rock-filled chaos, distance couldn't be measured in feet or miles. Minutes and hours tangled until she felt as stoned as she had a hundred fifty feet below the surface of Lake Superior, suffering from nitrogen narcosis.

  "Nice butt."

  Curt Schatz's flat drawl filtered through from behind her. His tone was devoid of lasciviousness, malice, or condescension. She'd never heard the words without one or all of these accouterments. Clearly she'd misheard. She stopped and turned, bending down to push her helmet under a curtain of limestone. "Pardon?" she murmured politely.

  "Nice butt," Curt repeated. "I couldn't help but notice. Since I started caving I've become something of an expert. I've followed some of the finest butts in the business. Yours is up there. Better than Peter McCarty's. But don't tell him I said so. He prides himself on that sort of thing." He smiled showing small white teeth, perfectly even. In a fairy-tale princess, they might have been described as pearls. Peeking out from his thick beard they lent him the rakish charm of a wolf pup.

  Anna laughed. "Better than Dr. McCarty's?"

  "Yup," Schatz said. "And I know Pete's butt like the face of my own mother."

  Anna returned to the business of wending her way through New Mexico's lower intestine, but she felt cheered. No more airspace presented itself. The tonnage between her and the sky remained unchanged. Yet the anxiety squeezing the blood from her veins was momentarily lessened. Where there was humor there was a fighting chance of remaining sane.

  Such were the isolating influences of Lechuguilla's topography: a turn in a passage, a change in elevation, an upthrust of formations, and all light and sound was cut off. Smaller, more agile, Anna left Curt and was once again as alone as if the earth had buried each of them in their own personal grave.

  Dr. McCarty and Sondra were on the far side of two pincers of rock coming together under a wall of calcite drapery that folded down like velvet curtains to within sixteen inches of the bottom of the passage. Anna recognized the formation as the place she was to stop. The crawl was too tight to pass through except one at a time, but the floor beneath was uncharacteristically flat. Here she was to wait for Frieda to be brought across the backs of her fellows. Anna and Curt would set the Stokes onto the floor and feed it through to the McCartys. They would move it far enough up the passage that the cavers could congregate on the far side of the crawl and the mechanism of the turtle ferry would be started up again.

  Anna sat down, her fanny pleased with the smooth flooring, her body pleased with a rest. Sweat poured down the sides of her face, burned her eyes, and ran in a small river between her breasts. Mixing with the ubiquitous dirt, it formed a streaked layer of mud over skin and clothes. She pulled her helmet off and scratched at tickles creeping through her hair. No doubt this left her locks standing Medusa-like in snaky ire, but she could not have cared less. 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?"