She crowded between Leo and some Tim or other in the heat-stink of the truck’s cab. Leo slammed it onto the two-lane highway, the tanks racketing in back. The leaves crimped red on the stupid trees clumped like leftovers on the stony abandoned farmland to either side of the road. She swam her tongue dumbly in her mouth. Leo soon slowed onto a dirt road that quickly yielded to tire tracks rutted into burnt grass. The tracks ended at the fringes of a wood and the men clambered out and padded around Rand’s shiny black ark of a trailer, his dreadnought-black truck. Here too were his portable compressor and booster pump—when running they shrieked and clobbered like an army of pneumatic drills in a child’s nightmare—and a pyramid of tanks stacked beneath a tent awning that also sheltered a workbench arrayed with toolkits and spare hoses. Tim cut an admiring whistle—apparently unlike Leo he’d never been to this mostly secret site.
A sudden breeze beat open a small gap at the edge of the woods and then the gap quickly shut—the trail. It lay several miles inland from the huge bay on one side, the great lake on the other, veining the narrow peninsula and leading directly to the cave. She scrambled now from the truck only to fold at the waist and nearly puke. The scrappy grass turned black then white. She straightened and wiped her dusty mouth on her wrist. Even the sky looked X-rayed. Even Rand’s stuff and Jane’s—her small extra suit airing next to his large one on a picnic table and her tool kit tucked neatly under the bench. Marilyn’s mind shuffled these and other stark details. So much to go wrong—sometimes she woke in the middle of the night with a wall of water in her face, cold sweat brining her skin. She’d reach for Rand, the cascade effect of fear—the body’s soaring, plunging chemical transactions—mimicking the old lust. But after—as he dryly kissed her and settled on his side of the bed— she’d feel only her own pulse tapping in her fingertips as if trying to get out. Sometimes even the sex failed.
The sky seemed to clamp over her now like a lid. Leo and his guy kept at their busy buzz and she involuntarily swatted the air. And then with a minor roar another truck jounced along the rutted tracks. Soon a cop cruiser and SUV appeared from behind the truck’s hovering cloud of dust and Leo and crew commenced waving, self-important as politicians. True—someone had called Leo instead of her. Wife, best friend. Her mind rumbled and she fought to take stock. Someone had called. Someone was missing. I’m going, she announced.
Leo and Tim stared as if they’d never seen her before.
She floundered ahead along the footpath and entered the forest, descending a nursery-tale thicket of evergreens, dark stippled with peeling-parchment grays. Cool must wadded her lungs. A few minutes and she arrived at the rim of the four-foot-wide gash in the ground—a twelve-foot-deep vertical cleft with a small aluminum ladder attached to one side. Two hand-helds lay beside the hole. Gagging at the sulfur stench, she recalled her last time here this past spring on a whirlwind, one-day surprise visit to clumsily help Jane and Rand suit up. Marilyn had peered from this exact spot and felt the seeping chill on her bare arms. Bon voyage, she’d called down. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. And, watching first Jane then Rand at the bottom of the sink squeeze beneath a limestone ledge, had thought: no fucking way. By their accounts no cave Marilyn had ever toured was as cramped and murky and cold as this one. So thank you and fuck you two too, she’d thought as her friend and husband pressed past fanged cracks and into boa-tight rooms formed over eons by underground rivers carving rock. They’d plumbed rough mineral shafts with their lights while their breath-exhaust percolated around them—Marilyn knew all about it, or once knew, or knew enough, never having entered this too-bruising system herself. She’d then spent hours beside herself, lungs rilling, unable to catch her breath. When Jane and Rand had re-emerged and unsuited and debriefed, laughing and chattering, Marilyn had wordlessly stood around. Alone, lost. Dummy, after a time she’d knee-jerked into her car and veered precipitously home to take her place among arterial mazes and veinous routes like the avenues and crooked alleys of an old water-buried city.