Well In Time Part 10

Her hand on his shoulder gently rocked him. That was his first realization that he was sobbing. He registered this with distant amazement, while the fact-finding and -keeping part of his brain informed him that he had not cried since he was nine and broke his arm playing touch football. There must be a good deal pent up, given the intervening decades, his rational mind reasoned distantly.

While this internal dialogue proceeded and the sobbing continued unabated, some new and fresh place in his psyche was bathed in a delicious sense of peace and wellbeing. He lay beneath the confusion of voices like a big trout in the calm s.p.a.ce beneath turbulent water. He felt absolved of every sin, shriven of all burdens, as innocent and vulnerable as a newborn babe.

Finally, Calypso was able to get him to his feet and, supporting his hobbling, half-delusional stagger, she guided him a short distance into a side room off the main cavern, where she leaned him against the wall while she lit a lantern. Hill promptly slid down into a heap and lay crooning and chuckling to himself, as Calypso went about setting up camp from the stored supplies. She lit a camp stove and put water on to boil, rolled out self-inflating mattresses, and spread sleeping bags on top. She brewed two tin cups of tea and handed one to Hill, who had propped himself against the wall and was now staring blankly at the shadows jiggling and dancing over the stone walls.

"What is this place?" His voice surprised her with its youthful lilt. The question might have been asked by a curious ten-year-old.

"After that horrible tube, Javier and I both felt we needed to provide some comfort for ourselves, so we prepared this room. We liked it because it's about the size of our bedroom at home." She smiled and glanced at the ceiling that stood a good four feet above her head. "Plenty of breathing s.p.a.ce."

"And how far are we from getting out of this place?"

"When we get up from sleeping, it will basically be a stroll and then we'll be outside under the sky."

Hill accepted the bowl of soup she handed him and tilted it eagerly to his lips. "I'm starving! How long has it been since we ate?"

"You're the one with the wrist.w.a.tch."

Hill pulled back his cuff and squinted at his watch, did a double take, and stared at it in amazement. "It's after eight o'clock! But it was almost nine, when we were having breakfast, so that means...But it can't be. Can it? Have we really been in this cave almost twelve hours?"

Calypso smiled at him with mischief sparkling in her eyes.

"Twelve hours you think, huh?" She laughed. "Walter, it takes a full day to get through this cave. We've been spelunking for almost twenty-four hours!"

"You're kidding." His voice was deadpan.

"No, Walter. I'm completely serious. If you feel exhausted, now you know why."

"I had no idea..."

"You lose all track of time in a cave, without natural light." She collected his cup and refilled it with soup. "There's really no way to antic.i.p.ate whether it will be light or dark when we come out. I'm always surprised." They drank their soup in silence while Hill contemplated this.

When they had drunk all the soup, Calypso rummaged in her pack, came up with two oranges and handed one to Hill.

"Dessert."

"Every adventure I go on with you, I end up losing weight. It beats regular attendance at the gym." Even Hill's thumbs felt tired, as he peeled the orange. "After this, I'm going to need to lie down."

"Me, too." Calypso gathered their cups, scoured them with sand, and rinsed them in a meager stream of bottled water, then stored them again in the metal hamper.

"How'd you get that big thing through the tube?"

Calypso smiled. "We brought it in from this side. You think we're crazy enough to try to wrestle it through there?"

"Crazy is what I think this entire place and your lifestyle in it is," Hill muttered. He rolled onto his knees and crawled to the nearest sleeping bag. "Do you mind?"

"Not at all. I'm right behind you." She switched on her headlamp, blew out the lantern, and came to sit on the bag next to Hill's, busying herself untying her shoes and flexing her feet. "Oh but it feels good to get those off!"

In answer, there was only Hill's soft breathing. Calypso dragged her pack over to serve as a pillow, crawled into her bag, and zipped herself in. When she turned off her light, the blackness that engulfed her was already part of her dreams.

Then softly, through the fog of sleep, she heard Hill's whisper: "You were wearing a skirt."

"Um?"

"A skirt. Why did you pack a skirt?"

Calypso did, in fact, have a skirt at the bottom of her pack along with her lipstick, but she had not worn either.

"You're dreaming, Walter."

"No." She heard him s.h.i.+ft onto his side, facing her. "I'm not dreaming. I saw you, standing in that opening in the rock. The wind was blowing your skirt."

"What opening in the rock?"

"The one right above the tightest part of the tube. If it hadn't been for that-the sight of the stars, the fresh air flooding in, and you standing there talking to me-I think I would have lost my mind. You saved my life. Thank you."

Calypso opened her eyes to the limitless blackness and stared. Memories of her own initiation into alternate consciousness filled her: Santa Rita prison, the steely grip of the guard's hands, the rape, the overwhelming of her natural boundaries, the pinioning of her innate strength. And then the euphoria afterwards: the strength derived from having survived, the sense of expansion, of floating, of becoming one with all that is.

Finally, she sighed and murmured, "You're entirely welcome, Walter. Now, go to sleep."

Rancho Cielo

After the explosions and the firing of the howitzer, the battle raged on. Men advanced on the ground, only to be mown down by Javier's gunners on the wall, who fought tenaciously, reloading and firing with trained rapidity and accuracy. The snipers managed to keep anyone from firing the howitzer again. Another of Pedro's traps erupted from under the roadbed, lifting trucks and SUVs into the air, exploding them.

All the while, Javier's home was burning. The heat of it became intense, then almost unbearable, for the men on the walls but they would not be dislodged. Scorched and exhausted, they kept cramming fresh clips into their rifles and firing, until there was no one left to kill.

A sudden, eerie silence fell. The only sound was the crackling of flames as they consumed the house. By the time the men were free to fight the fire, there was nothing left to save.

5.

The Cave

Calypso awoke to pitch blackness and at first, in panic, could not remember where she was, although she knew that wherever it was, she was with Hill. He must be having the same sensation, because she could hear him scrabbling for the switch on his headlamp. With a click, sudden illumination revealed the folded and veined wall and ceiling of the cave and remembrance flooded her.

"Good morning, Walter," she muttered, still half asleep.

"Good morning to you! Just stay put. I'll get the tea water going." Hill pushed from the ground and rummaged for a match, then lit the camp lantern and stove. Calypso squeezed her eyes shut and turned on her side, away from the light.

"Still tired?"

"Um-hum."

"Some of this glue that pa.s.ses for instant oatmeal ought to fix you right up." He ripped open a foil pouch, sounding positively chirrupy.

Calypso sat up, her hair wrapped about her shoulders like a shawl, and observed Hill more closely.

"My, we're a merry little ball of suns.h.i.+ne this morning."

"Never felt better in my life." He began to whistle and the beam of his headlamp zigzagged about the s.p.a.ce in time. "When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin' along..." he sang softly, as if his whistle were still accompanying him. "Dee dum, dee dum, dee dum da dum...cheer up, cheer up the sun is red. Live, love, laugh, and be happy-y-y-y-y..." The final words were sung in full-throttle ba.s.s, his arms spread wide.

Calypso turned on her stomach and pulled her pack over her head.

Two hours later, the gloom of the cave began to brighten to twilight as they clambered up a final bouldered incline and saw sky glimmering within the black template of the cave's mouth. By Hill's watch, it was close to six o'clock, but neither could say with a.s.surance if it was six in the morning or six at night.

"It's like being on one of those trans.p.a.cific flights where you cross the international dateline and you don't know even what day it is, let alone what time," Hill said, pulling himself up the final incline. He stuck his head out of the cave and peered around like a groundhog a.s.sessing the weather. "The sun seems to be over there, behind a mountain," he reported, pointing to his left as he clambered out into the light.

"That's west, so it's evening." Calypso stepped from the cave, shrugged off her pack and dropped it on the ground. They were standing at the base of a cliff soaring into an ultramarine sky that, to her cave-weary eyes, sparked electrically in the slanting rays of the sun. Before them was a steep downhill slope of tumbled boulders and low, scruffy brush.

"We've dropped almost a mile in elevation," she said, glancing at Hill, who also seemed bedazzled by the sight of the sky. "That's the Batopilas River just below us. It's probably only a mile away."

"I thought it was the Urique."

"No, we've moved right through the mountain, from one river drainage to another."

"Amazing! Where to now, fearless leader?"

"There's an old mule trail that follows the river. It was built in the seventeenth century to bring supplies to the mines and to bring the bullion out. We'll follow that into Batopilas. We keep a safe house there."

"Is it far?"

Calypso picked up her pack and slung it over her shoulder. "Far enough. We won't come close to getting there before dark."

She began to pick her way down the slope toward the river. Hill started after her and then turned back, leaning his shoulders into the opening of the cave.

"Thank you," he called. He didn't know why he was doing it or to whom he was addressing his grat.i.tude, but somewhere deep within him, he knew it was the right thing to do.

The western sky, clasped between twin p.r.o.ngs of cliffs, began to flame with radiant crimson and gold, and deep indigo shadows nested in the swales of the canyon. Calypso led the way down a steep scree slope made more difficult by the falling light.

"We can't make Batopilas tonight," she called back to Hill, who was lowering himself gingerly through a notch between two car-sized boulders. "It's just too treacherous. We don't need a broken leg to add to our woes."

"I agree." Hill's legs were shaking with exhaustion and his entire body ached from the exertion in the cave. "Is there somewhere we could hole up for the night?" They were out of water and his words clicked off a dry tongue.

"There's a spring up ahead." Calypso's voice was pinched with fatigue. "We'll stop there for the night."

A quarter hour of carefully lowering themselves down the treacherous slope brought them to a game trail beaten faintly into the loose gravel.

"We have to head back uphill a little," Calypso said, pointing up the trail. "It's not far." Hill only nodded, then followed as Calypso turned right onto the trail.

A few more minutes of scrabbling uphill and they pulled themselves onto a tiny plateau. An extension of the cliff, like the flounce of a lady's skirt hem, backed the flat s.p.a.ce and from within the ruffled rocks came a delicious sound.

Rounding the edge of the outcrop, they came on a scene of astonis.h.i.+ng beauty. The base of the rocks formed a shallow grotto, covered floor, walls and ceiling, with moss and hanging ferns. Water eddied down the back wall into a shallow pool that shown in last light like a silver s.h.i.+eld. At the back of the pool, beside the falling water, was a figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe carved from the living stone, daubed with ochre and cloaked in shadow.

They dropped their packs and rummaged for their water bottles. Calypso entered the grotto first and knelt on the lip of the pool.

"There are animal tracks here," she said. "Deer and racc.o.o.n." She cast her eyes along the bank as she held her bottle submerged in the cool water. "And something else. . ." she frowned and bent to squint at the muddy border. "Sometime bigger. Maybe a large dog or a cougar. It's hard to tell. The prints are all muddled."

She pushed to her feet and backed out of the grotto, inviting Hill into it with a sweep of her hand. Then she raised the bottle to her lips and swallowed the sweet, cold water gratefully, in long pulls until the container was empty, her head thrown back and her eyes on the first stars winking above the iron clamps of the cliffs.

"How did you find this place?"

They were lounging around a small brush wood fire. Above them, the moonless night sky was limpid with starlight. A cold wind tugged at their mylar s.p.a.ce blankets and made the fire gutter and smoke. Calypso drew her blanket more tightly around her shoulders and stared into the fire, remembering.

"It was the first time we made it all the way through the cave. We'd been trying to find the pa.s.sage for months. A Rarmuri shaman told us it was possible, but we'd only come to blind ends before."

She turned her eyes toward Hill.

"You can imagine how we felt once we'd started into the tube. I was sure we were going to die in there. I only kept going because Javier was ahead of me and I didn't want to get separated from him. And he says he only kept going because I was behind him and he didn't want to make me back up!" She laughed, shaking her head.

"So when we finally staggered out, we were exhausted and ready to die from thirst. It was summer, too, and so hot! I don't know what we would have done if Sure hadn't appeared, like a miracle."

"Sure?"

"A Rarmuri man. We just looked up and there he was, standing on a boulder. He led us here."

Calypso could still see him in her mind's eye, with his long, bronze runner's legs, his breechcloth and sky blue cotton s.h.i.+rt with long, gathered sleeves, staring at them as if they were as startling to him as he was to them.

"Kuira," Javier had said. h.e.l.lo.

"Kuira," the man responded, his voice almost a whisper, as was customary among his shy people.

"Wawik?" Javier asked hopefully. Water?