Cavedweller (45 page)

Mim’s hand was on her shoulder. A careful light purposefully shielded pointed away from Cissy’s eyes. Mim’s eyes were huge and bright.

“Girl! You sleep hard.”

Sleep. Four hours like nothing. Four hours like four minutes. Let me sleep again, Cissy thought. She shook her head and pushed herself up. She looked around her like a blind fish who had suddenly grown eyes, opened her mouth, and grunted a laugh. Not a dream, not a pause, just an indrawn breath and simple unconsciousness, her body made new in four hours of complete rest. Heaven no doubt lay on the other side of a long cave.

Cissy did not tell anyone but she knew. If she made her home in a cave, she would never have another bad night, never miss another moment’s sleep.

 

 

I
n the days after the overnight trip down Little Mouth, Cissy found herself thinking about the base of the last cliff they had passed in the northern passage. Pea gravel was there, and sand that was almost red. Something was there, something that called Cissy on. A little more endurance, a little more care, they could have found how far back it went. That was how you lost yourself in the big caves, Cissy kept scolding herself. You started thinking you could find the passage that had to be there, the northwest connection or the link to Mammoth Cave.

Cissy had been to Mammoth with Delia for her seventeenth birthday. They had rented a motel room where they could stay overnight, and done the whole tour. It had been spectacular but predictable, a tame cave, another walk-through with colored lights and plank paths, bigger than any Cissy had seen but still less interesting than the wild caves. They went with a group down predictable corridors of dim shade and reflected light. Cissy persuaded the guide to turn off the big lights and let them stand for a moment where once someone had lain on his belly, cold and exhausted and exhilarated with discovery. That dark had been tantalizing but too brief.

Light is defined by its edges, Cissy realized early on in Little Mouth. The beam of a flashlight was edge-sharp, cutting past rock so that you had to teach yourself to see it. It was so easy to see what was not there, miss what was. Diffuse soft daylight was kind. It helped the eyes. Cave light challenged perception and invited hallucinations. The light in wild caves was tricky and strange. It tricked the eyes, seduced fear, and manufactured terror. It made you feel yourself utterly mortal and at risk. Cissy loved it.

After Nolan took her down in Paula’s Lost and Dede moved into Amanda’s old room and gave her the bedroom, Cissy had hung double-thick curtains over all the windows, sealed the edges of the doorjamb, and put a muffling quilt over the door itself. “You turned it into a tent,” Dede had said of the room, but that was not true. Cissy had turned the room into a cave, a place where the dark was welcome bur never deep enough. The deep dark was what she wanted, and it was under the ground, always waiting for her, a landscape of black and white and gray. Like the moon on video, the dark in the cave made color irrelevant. When color did appear in the cave, it startled Cissy so much that she went blind for a moment. What she saw burned on her pupils, yellow crust on an overhang, pink flush at the circular edges of a sunken bed of sand, gray-green shading into pearly, lustrous blue. What she saw in the deep places was too subtle to be noticed aboveground. Everything down there was a stage, a place where something was meant to happen. The dark waited for light but did not need it. The dark was ancient and sufficient and patient. If Cissy had not come, it would have waited for another—the eye that could take it all in and glory in the beauty. Down in the dark everything waited all the time, for all time.

“I want to be buried down here,” Cissy told Mim as they sat with their lanterns dimmed down, the shadows close in and comfortable.

“Lonely.”

“No. Quiet.”

“Safe,” Jean said. “Nobody could get you down here.”

“Maybe,” Cissy said. “Maybe not. Just quiet and alone. I like that idea. I like it a lot.”

 

 

M.
T. had gotten so fat her upper arms seemed to be part of her breasts, great soft mounds of flesh that moved together. With her broad face and small features, delicate and close together, she looked like Glenda the Good Witch, but Glenda with a glandular problem, her aura warm and enveloping, her rosebud mouth almost always pursed to smile or laugh. For all her size, M.T. seemed no less attractive to men. Men waited on M.T. as if for spring. She was always “with” someone, though she swore she would never marry again.

“Did it once,” she told Delia. “Did it for real. Not like some of these children do it today. I married Paul, I meant it. And I just an’t like that no more. Wouldn’t mean it again, not like that, and won’t do it without meaning it. So everybody should just be warned.”

The warning deterred no one. M.T. kept company steadily, though never too seriously. The first surprise was always how she could blush, look over, and snare a man. The second surprise was how gracefully she could ease that man out of her bed. Men walked away bemused by the experience. They would say, “Yeah, we had a thing.” Then they would smile in remembrance, shake their heads, and give the rueful grin that so clearly expressed their confusion about just how that thing had gone the way it had. They didn’t talk bad about M.T. the way they might have been expected to do. Most took to calling her “good thing” as if that were her nickname. “Good thing,” they would murmur in M.T.’s direction, and she would smile and put her hand out in that delicate gesture that acknowledged the affection but asked nothing further.

“Woman’s got a hell of a talent,” Stephanie would complain. “She should get her own television show and teach us all how to do it.”

If pressed, most of M.T.’s old boyfriends would admit they thought about her and wouldn’t mind seeing her again. It was almost as if she had drained off all their urgency and what she left behind was a kind of deep contentment. If called upon, they would come right over easily enough, help her out and do a job for her. Jackson Melridge cleared her gutters and checked her roof every fall. Garret Sultan would ride over on his riding mower and cut back the field behind her house, asking her solicitously how her allergies were doing. Charlie Peachhill would drop by to share a cup of coffee and take a look at the engine of her old Chevy. When she decided to buy a new one, he came along, saying, “An’t gonna let no slick old boy do you wrong.” After, he collected compliments for the deal he got her. “Got to take care of our M.T.,” he replied to the men who teased him. “Got to make sure she’s all right.”

When M.T. went out on the street, men called out to her, mostly men of a certain age, near her age or older, men old enough to remember slow dancing with a sweet-smelling, softly round woman like her. The young boys practicing their sullen passivity at the gas station would watch and wonder. What was it about that fat old lady? But then they would pass close to her in the market, smell her perfume, and wonder again. So soft, so easy, eyes bright with confidence, a mouth that knew things. If they came too close, she would give that deep husky laugh, that laugh that had no cruelty in it, that laugh that was like a conversation, languid and unafraid.

“You be careful boy,” the older men would tell them. “That’s too much woman for you.” It brought M.T. a new generation, though one everyone was sure she would never take to her bed. “That’s a woman needs a man,” the good old boys would say. But M.T. would just smile. The young boys would rake her yard, show her the new dances, tell her stories whose original versions she had long ago forgotten. Maybe she didn’t sleep with them, but she made them feel as if she might. That was power of yet another kind, one she understood intuitively.

“How you doing, M.T.?” she’d hear as she went up the street to the Bonnet.

“Pretty good,” she’d call back without turning around. “Hard for an old woman like me these days, but pretty good nonetheless.”

“Oh, M.T., you an’t old. You barely into the good part, woman.” M.T. would laugh, then put her hand back to touch a tanned dark arm. There was something in the way she did that, like a trusted older sister. Immediate family. Sexy as hell.

Cissy decided that M.T. had her own tribe, men who had been hers for a season and then took flight like butterflies lifting into the morning, but her scent remained on them. They were in some sense always hers, even those who married—perhaps especially those who married, those who could no longer flirt easily with her, and could only look longingly at the remembered heaven of her embrace.

“What is it you got, M.T.? What is it you do?” Dede asked the question as if she were teasing, though Cissy had no doubt she thought, as they all did, that M.T. knew something, had some magic or secret technique she would never share. It was a question that only got more persistent with the years. For no matter how loose and easy M.T. became, the men of Cayro continued to pursue her.

“You got some exotic skill only possible for a woman of size? You half smother them or something?”

“Dede Windsor, the way you talk.” Steph looked over at M.T.

“Oh, leave her alone.” M.T. wiped sweat from her temples and waved a hand in Steph’s direction. “She got to learn the truth sometime.”

With a growling harrumph M.T. settled herself in an empty pump seat, kicked the lever twice to drop it to a comfortable height, and carefully smoothed hair back off her brow while watching herself in the mirror. She easily had the attention of everyone in the Bonnet by the time she turned to Dede and spoke.

“Maybe,” she began, “it’s just that I know what men want.” She smiled when Steph snorted and shook her head. “Or maybe it’s just that I’ve reached the point in life where what they want is closer to what I want. So it an’t no big struggle to give it to them. Maybe one thing men want is for things not to be so hard.”

M.T. paused. A small grin crossed her face and she gave Dede a sly wink before she spoke again. “Course it also might be that with all my padding they know they not going to hurt themselves, you know? Not like some skinny sharp-boned things running around here. Hurt them or hurt themselves. Somebody in pain around here all the time.”

“Well, that’s a fact.” Steph gave her righteous nod. “That’s a fact for sure. Somebody in pain around here all the time.” She looked over to Delia for confirmation but Delia was looking out the window, her face expressionless and tanned dark. If she was in pain, her face would never let anyone know.

A rock or a hard place, Delia knew where she had come down. Her hands in rushing water, her mouth pressed tight, she kept her eyes on the crown of Gillian’s head and the hair she was washing, her attention on the talk in the shop.

“Emmet said there was another reporter hanging around at Goober’s, asking questions about you. Wanting to know if any of Clint’s people were still around.”

“Ummm.” Delia massaged the scalp gently, knowing that if she said nothing in response, Gillian would tell her more.

“Nobody had a word to say to him, a-course. He was cheaper than that guy came around two years ago. Wasn’t offering to buy nobody dinner. Wasn’t flashing no money or talking no trash. Little skinny fellow with straggly hair and a pitiful mustache.” Gillian paused briefly as Delia reached to shut off the water and squeezed water through Gillian’s hair until it ran off in sheets down the sides of the little porcelain sink. Only when Delia rocked her chair forward did Gillian resume.

“I hate a mustache on a man, don’t you?” she said. “Always tastes like what he ate last, smells like dust, and looks bad no matter how it’s cut. My Richard used to wear one, and it took me forever to get him to cut it off. Thought he had a weak chin, can you imagine ? And that straggly thing was supposed to disguise the fact? Lord, what men think. I mean, can you imagine?”

Delia wrapped a towel around Gillian’s damp hair. Guided her over to the pump-up chair and saw M.T. eyeing her in the mirror. You okay? M.T.’s expression communicated. Delia shrugged in reply and turned her full attention to Gillian.

“You want it just generally neatened up, or did you have something special in mind?” Delia’s eyes in the mirror were steady and unblinking, her features impassive, her frame steady, posed behind Gillian’s hunched wet head.

“Oh, just work your magic.” Gillian patted at her wet temple with one hand and smiled into the mirror at Delia’s face. “You always know what this old head needs.”

Delia smiled and closed her eyes briefly. Here, she thought, I am right here and nowhere else, and this is what I am going to do. “Trim it up,” she said, opening her eyes, “shape it a little more to the sides of your head.” Her fingers caressed momentarily the temple Gillian had just touched. “If I cut it back just a little, it should fall just to the side of your ears. You used to wear it like that, didn’t you? When you and Richard were first going together?”

Gillian sighed and nodded, closing her eyes as she did so, leaving Delia free to look again at her own face, the marks there of how many times she had shut her mouth on what she dared not say, the life she had walked away from and never regretted. Randall wore a mustache. It had always tasted sweet.