Cavedweller (36 page)

“You look awful.”

“Yeah.” He glanced around briefly, as if to make sure no one was watching, and reached to catch her hand. “You got to help me,” he told her. “Maudy, please. Don’t let them bury me here. Take me home to Cayro. Don’t let them put me out under that lawn where sick men will walk on me when I’m dead.”

Brewster squeezed Maudy’s hand. He’s raving, she thought, but she could see the graveyard through his window. It was unfenced, with no headstones, just little markers set down in the grass. Men were walking there, heads lowered as if they were reading the markers, stepping casually from one to the next.

“All right,” Maudy promised.

Brewster’s fingers relaxed in hers. He would be dead before the week was out, and maybe he had been raving, but Maudy brought his body home and buried it in the cave country.

“You think he’s here?” Cissy looked at the slope of pines and dogwood.

“Maybe.” Nolan’s eyes were sad.

“Aunt Maudy said Brewster brought her out here when they were first married, to show her the bats, but they got distracted and forgot to watch at sunset.” Nolan smiled. “It was about the only happy story she ever told me about Brewster. Sounded like she really enjoyed herself with him out here. Think it was his favorite place, and maybe hers for a while there.”

Cissy was looking back down into the pit. The cave was whistling hollowly, tongueless and inarticulate. A cave could not cry warning, but this one seemed to. She stared at the mouth of rock, rigid, eternally wide in its broken, dirt-lipped howl. It breathes, she thought. It breathes like Clint or an old woman with emphysema. She closed her eyes and listened as the sun dropped a little further down the sky.

“Yeah, Brewster sure loved this place,” Nolan said.

Cissy nodded. She could see it, that broken man falling in love with a hole in the ground. It made sense to her.

“It’s marvelous. It’s the best damn birthday I ever had.”

People go caving for no reason anyone can predict. Mountain climbing is more exhilarating. Skydiving offers a better view. Skiing, fencing, or even horseback riding provide just as good a workout. Caving is not a sport but a dare, more a trial than an excursion. A dark, deep, pitched hole is the perfect place to test the nerves, the muscles, the survival instincts, but the risk is awful, the terror primeval. From those first moments lying on her back in the loose shale of Paula’s Lost, Cissy knew she loved it as Brewster had, the dark and the safety, the risk and the unknown depths.

“Can we come back?” she asked. “Can we get some better lights and come back?”

Nolan saw the hunger and the fear in her expression. “Sure,” he told her. “Anytime you want.”

“Soon,” Cissy said. Her heart was racing, and there was a sugary feeling of excitement all through her insides. “Let’s come back soon.”

“All right. We’ll talk to my cousins and get some lights. We’ll come back whenever you want.” He forced himself not to frown. He was thinking about what his daddy had said about Brewster, the sad way he had talked about that boy who wasted his life. Should have known he was crazy, Mr. Reitower said, when he took to climbing around in that cave. It was one thing to throw parties, it was another to sit in a dark hole in the ground all by yourself. He was talking to Aunt Maudy, who nodded at him and spoke the words that stuck in Nolan’s mind.

“The first question to ask anyone climbing down into those holes is always ‘Why?’ ” Aunt Maudy said. “But I swear, don’t ever believe the first reply.”

N
olan Reitower had two obsessions. He played clarinet and he pined for Dede Windsor. The first was new and he was extraordinarily gifted at it; the second went back years, and at that he was a dismal failure. From the beginning, Dede never looked in his direction.

“He won’t never make a man,” Dede said of Nolan. She had a way of saying what other people hesitated to say, but once they heard her, they knew they had been thinking the same thing. About Nolan she was deadly accurate. He remained baby-faced and boyish even as he grew to a man’s height. But what bothered Dede was not only that he was more than a year younger than her, but that his idea of courting was to make moon eyes and gape at her in public. There was also the fact that Nolan was a fairly pudgy boy when he started following Dede around, and for all that he grew to be wide-shouldered, he stayed soft. The only nice thing anyone ever said about Nolan was that he was a good boy to his mama and daddy. Not much of a recommendation to the very particular Dede—good boys were not what caught her eye.

“He’s too good,” Dede said. “An’t he got any wild in him?” No, Cissy thought. He did not. What was wild in Nolan was his passion for Dede Windsor. From that first run-in on the steps, when Dede called him “mama’s little precious,” Nolan was captured. Another boy would have taken offense. Nolan took fire, and never got over it. For him, there was simply no other female but Dede Windsor.

A few months after the birthday trip to Paula’s Lost, Nolan started working with his daddy at Biscuit World after Mr. Reitower had what everyone described as “a little-bitty heart attack.” “Nothing but a warning,” Nadine pronounced it. “A warning to put your house in order, honey. Eat a little better. Get more rest. God’s way of saying slow down.” For reasons that Nolan could not understand, Nadine seemed not to worry. It was. as if she could not picture any serious threat to what had always been, life going on as smooth as the surface of a china plate.

Nolan looked carefully into his daddy’s pale face and immediately developed his own notions about putting their house in order. Like the good son he was, he quietly reorganized his days so that he could spend three hours every morning helping his daddy out before making the second bell for school. He’d come into homeroom smelling of baking powder, butter, and salt, steam rising off a little bag of sausage biscuits clutched in his hand. Before long, Nolan’s eyes—his best feature, everyone agreed—had sunk into his biscuit-swollen cheeks, and he had to turn sideways to get through the door. From Cissy’s viewpoint, the worst of it was that Nolan could no longer climb down the entrance to Paula’s Lost.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have time,” Nolan kept telling Cissy, and it was true. Between Biscuit World and practicing the clarinet, the boy did not have a minute to spare.

The clarinet was Nadine’s idea. She had pushed Nolan to join the school band, hoping it would draw him out of his bookish ways, and she had suggested the clarinet because she imagined it to be a proper instrument, not so heavy and ponderous as a tuba or as sexually suspect as a piccolo. And while she liked the sound of the euphonium, she was not sure how Nolan would look holding it close to his chest. He had his daddy’s build and was going to be big and awkward. No, she decided, her boy could manage the clarinet and look good playing it.

Nadine had been sure that the clarinet would be a temporary hobby. Nolan lost interest in everything eventually. Music would be a useful but transient distraction from adolescent self-consciousness. She bought an inexpensive Vito Leblanc, a decent beginner’s model made of plastic, with nickel-plated keys. “Resonite, Nolan, Resonite. That’s what the dealer said,” she kept repeating. What Nadine could not guess was that her shy boy would find his life’s design writ in sixteenth notes, for once Nolan got his chops working, he discovered he could breathe through that clarinet. He could soar through and out of it into a world no one knew, a world suffused with the drunken glory his talent stirred within him.

Nolan practiced whenever he could, mostly after school, when his daddy was home. Biscuit World closed at one every afternoon, earlier on the busiest days. “Once they’re gone, they’re gone,” Mr. Reitower would laugh, already thinking about climbing into his bed as he wiped down the counter. Nolan’s daddy slept every afternoon from the time he got home until dinner. He worried about Nolan getting up so early to help out, never managing a nap until after school and band practice. “Growing boys need food, sure, but they need sleep too,” he would tell the oblivious Nolan every few days. “Dream time,” he complained to Nadine. “The boy is getting no dream time, no easy, unbooked, lay-around-and-think time. That’s what a boy needs to make a man. Time to imagine himself what he is going to be.”

Most days Nolan got no nap at all, just went drowsy through the hours until the moment when he could put a reed in his mouth and come fully awake and full of joy. What his father did not understand was that his music was dream time for Nolan. He did not take up the clarinet to pretend he was Benny Goodman, or even to hide behind black plastic and shiny keys. Nolan had always liked music well enough. Nadine set the radio dial dutifully on the classical channel in the early evening, and every morning his daddy would put on the jazz station from Atlanta while they cut biscuits. But that bland appreciation had nothing to do with what Nolan felt after the first six months with the clarinet.

Nolan’s music teacher, Mr. Clausen, worried about him as much as his daddy did. Nadine had found the man after the school-band director told her to “get somebody knows what he’s doing.” Mr. Clausen taught at the community college and directed a little wind ensemble that practiced a lot but rarely played for the public. Cayro was not a place where people would turn out to hear a wind ensemble. He had been almost rude to Nadine when she first called him, but became remarkably polite after a few sessions with her son.

“It’s a miracle. That boy, the way he plays, no one knows what he can do. I listen to him and I think I’ve gone crazy. I listen to him and I start to believe there is a God.”

“Mr. Clausen!” Nadine was horrified. “Do not tell me you do not believe in God.” Nadine was willing to ignore a lot for the sake of getting her boy a good teacher, but not blasphemy. She knew musicians were dangerous that way. Freethinkers, hippies, atheists, queers, intellectuals—all were of a type, and not a type she wanted Nolan to know too much about. She loved him and knew how much he loved his music, but she also knew how easily boys could be led astray. She had already lost one son, after all. If Clausen was a danger to Nolan, she would make sure he never got near him again.

“Yes. Oh, yes, I believe in God. Absolutely.” A vision of losing his prize pupil lent sincerity to Mr. Clausen’s profession of faith. “Who else would have sent me this prodigy right when I was ready to give up? You have no idea how many youngsters are sent to me as punishment. Mostly mine. But your boy could be a virtuoso if he got a little more sleep.” Mr. Clausen hesitated, not wanting to offend Nolan’s mother. “I just think we have to make sure he gets the kind of encouragement he needs.” His words prompted a deeper frown from Nadine. She too worried about her child. She had erred with his older brother, Stephen, and she didn’t want Nolan leaving home in a huff, only calling once or twice a year.

Nolan was the only one who did not worry. Except for his continual despair over Dede, he was a boy full of patient confidence. He slept when he could, daydreamed when he could not, and came alive to play the clarinet, first in the high school band, then in the orchestra, and eventually in Mr. Clausen’s wind groups. Nolan saw no need for dream time because he lived in a dream. He had only two waking states, the one in which he drew pure and astonishing music out of the clarinet, and the other when he was watching Dede Windsor with his dark puppy eyes. Nolan had no ambition but to play his instrument in such a way that other people could feel the exhilaration it produced in him, and to win Dede’s love.

Mr. Reitower died of a massive heart attack two weeks before Nolan’s high school graduation, not sweating over his biscuit trays but lying in his own bed in a deep and easy sleep. His death ended any chance Nolan had to go off and study music. A scholarship might pay all of Nolan’s expenses, but it would not take care of his mother. And what people had always said about Nolan was true. He was a good son. With Mr. Reitower gone, Nadine needed a good son.

From the moment of her husband’s death, Nolan’s mama fell into a stunned and furious silence. Like a sunstruck puppy, she could not seem to understand what had happened to her or what had to be done now. Her good husband, that reliable man, had the smallest insurance policy ever issued. They were not destitute, but damn close, and Nadine could not accept that.

“How could he?” she snapped, glaring at Nolan and the neighbors who came in to help. She might have meant his dying, or perhaps his buying that pitiful policy that did not cover the cost of the cheapest burial she could arrange. She might have been speaking of Stephen, who called but did not come, and sent a check so small as to be no help at all. Or she might have been accusing God. Nolan thought she was close to it, an outright complaint to a divinity she had never questioned before. But what he really believed was that she was accusing him. It was his fault, his failure.

Within a few weeks of the funeral, Nadine stormed out the front door, angrily shoving the screen door, which snapped back and whacked her on the forehead. She staggered once and fell down the steps, breaking her left arm and, worse, her left hip.