Cavedweller (46 page)

 

 

D
elia thought the only pure thing she had ever known was how she felt in the middle of that roar of sound—Mud Dog onstage and Randall grinning like a man drunk on the reverberations of Delia’s voice. A resounding bass note merged into 4/4 staccato downbeats. Booger’s hands fused to his keyboard, and Delia followed behind, her voice becoming suddenly something separate, something like sex. That music was sex. Or sex was so much less than it was. For Delia, it was the only spiritual rush she had ever felt. Being music, the glory of singing out that predatory chord of need and exaltation, had taken her right up out of herself, her small grief and unrelenting shame. Her voice was made over into an instrument, her whole soul fell into the swell of chord and song. When she sang, Delia forgot what she had done, the baby girls she had abandoned. She stopped hearing the song of their breathing, endlessly reverberating in the back of her brain. The one life was cut off from the other. She could not have both. She had chosen, God knew, the only life she could stand. But she never forgot the other, not Randall and the business, but the music. She never ceased to mourn it.

When they first came back to Cayro, Delia spent too many of her sleepless nights lying on the couch playing the records with headphones on in the deep of the night. She imagined she could push through her despair with the sound of her own voice, but it did not work that way. There was a darkness in the music that called her name. It was as husky and biting as two ounces of honey in four of whiskey. Too sweet in the first heat of the swallow, it burned into the throat so purely a flush went down Delia’s arms to her thumbs. Every time Randall’s bass thudded into the rhythm, Delia rocked her head back against the arm of the couch, astonished all over again at the power of the music they had made, that thing so much greater than melody on vinyl. Every time the record played over, Delia’s despair deepened and she hunched deeper into herself until all she could do was turn her face into the couch cushions and cry.

It was not that Mud Dog had been that good, but that they had made their music from the core of who they were—the guitars flexing Randall’s raw anger and Booger’s intractable anguish, that drum ricochet that was Little Jimmy’s plea to move up front, and Rosemary’s tremolo so pure it lifted Delia’s growling song out of heartbreak and up to transcendence. The voice of Mud Dog was not just Delia’s voice but some intimate cry from the voice box of God. As she listened to that music, Delia’s heart would seize up again, as if blood were being wrung from her soul. The feel of those years would wash over her, the lyrics she and Rosemary had pieced out on brown paper bags, the chord changes Randall and Booger put together as resonating as the song they had made out of her restless, angry grief.

“Born on the corner of Nazareth and Calvary,” Randall sang on the opening to
Diamonds and Dirt,
his voice high and thin. Then Delia took over “Nazareth and Calvary,” dropping an octave while the drum’s pulse resounded like a heartbeat slowing into death. It was a song not about crucifixion, but about guilt and expiation. Delia’s song. Penance and rock and roll. Jesus and the Holy Ghost in leather fringe and high-heeled boots. It was their signature piece. The crowd would take up the theme and sing back at the band like the call and answer at Pentecostal Sunday sermons. Sing, mama. Sing, Delia.

On the couch, drunk on grief, Delia had hunched and sobbed listening to the live version over and over, her voice and Randall’s intertwined, her memories darker than that room in the night. She had expected penance, been sure of retribution, and almost gloried in her own damnation. It was all part of the romance of the music, sitting up all night and weeping until she had no tears left. It was Cissy who stopped her. One night Delia looked up from the couch and saw her girl in the doorway, eyes wide as dinner plates and lower lip clamped between her teeth. When Delia pulled off her headphones, Cissy ran back to bed. But Delia had seen those eyes. She took the record off the turntable, carried it outside, and smashed it with a rock. Then she sat in the damp grass until the sun came up, wishing away the music, wishing away the pull at her heart.

What’s it like? the women at the shop used to ask Delia. Being in a band, loving a rock star, going on the road? What’s it like? What’s it like? Delia would just look at them, shrug, and not reply. She could not have explained. It had been a dream, life as a dream. Every day bleeding into the next, stoned one night and drunk the next. Sex outside on the terrace with the lights of Los Angeles gleaming softly over the edge of a low wall. Sweaty, thick air like a blanket pulled too close. Hip bruised from the edge of a flagstone and dust spilling into the corner of her right eye, burning until she wept. From the inside of the bungalow music playing. A woman’s voice made poignant by a low growl that was not meant to be so yielding. Janis doing “Ball and Chain” on a bootleg tape so bad the band was almost inaudible. But it was almost better that way. That voice carried the grief and guts of a woman riding her own nerves out into the unknown, like Delia on a good day. But Delia wouldn’t sing “Ball and Chain” onstage. “That’s Janis’s anthem,” she’d say, though it could have been hers. She had the drawl for it, especially when she had been drinking. But Delia preferred the smoother songs, not so demanding, not so tearing on the insides, the songs the audience might start singing along on. Everybody liked those. The drunks sang along with Janis, the drunks and the grief-stricken. The kids who came to hear Randall would sing with Delia. They would wind up and roar, and that was what Delia wanted—the group mind, the invisibility of being imaginary for a couple thousand people. All roar and lights—no discernible face or consciousness, she wanted to disappear into that huge mass of stink and noise and justification.

“I think they are sane out in California, which God knows they an’t much here in Georgia,” Delia told Cissy after they came back to Cayro. “But I was born here, so I was born crazy. And I want to die here, die with my hands doing something, not idle and spread. Not empty.”

“But you could have been rich.”

“I could have been dead. Like Randall or half the band. Heroin or speed or fast cars on wet streets. So easy, dying. So easy. And I was rich. For a day and a half or so, I was too rich to understand, so rich it didn’t mean anything. But I wanted something different. The crowd, the noise, like a congregation.” Delia closed her mouth, barely stopping herself from saying aloud the one thing she knew that might explain everything. “My mama left me and I left my own. Nothing I do will fix that.”

What stops grief? What heals the heart? Delia did not know. She had tried to cure herself of hurting, but she thought all she had managed was to put it off. How long can you put off hurting? “A lifetime,” Delia told herself hopefully. “You do it right, you can put off hurting forever.”

 

 

“G
illian, you look like a new woman.” M.T. sipped a bottle of peach-flavored iced tea and beamed into the mirror beside Delia’s shoulder.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Gillian put one hand up to the gently curling wave that turned back toward her ear. Her face looked thinner with her hair cut close to her cheeks; the fine line of her temples stood out and drew the glance to big dark eyes. “Delia always knows what I need.”

“Oh, anybody could cut your hair,” Delia said, shaking out the smock she pulled off Gillian’s shoulders. “Just got to follow the line of your face so it looks the way God intended. Nothing fancy, just a good-looking woman with a long neck.” She did not look at her own face. She kept her eyes on her hands, long blunt fingers and carefully trimmed, unpainted nails. Nothing fancy. Nothing but her own hands.

 

 

F
lowstone settles down at the rate of roughly two inches a year, the caving books said. It comes in shades from pure white to calcium yellow to mottled red. After her first trip down into Little Mouth, Cissy dreamed about flowstone, the slowly moving rock beneath the dirt. In her dreams flowstone was not hard but thick and soft as stale meringue. That white paste found in grade school libraries, dense and cloying and slowly stiffening against the skin, that was the flowstone in Cissy’s dreams. She lay back into it and it took on the shape of her body, the warmth of her skin. It settled beneath her, gently crept between her fingers and toes, and rose to cradle her hips. Compressed. Viscous. Alive. Growing slowly, but growing. Flowstone made a white noise in Cissy’s head, intimate and safe. She waited for it to wrap her around, slowly encase her body, and by that motion season her soul.

Like me, Cissy thought as she dreamed. Flowstone was like her—dirt pressed hard, unvalued and ignored. Kick it and it did not kick back. It crumbled, broke apart, and absorbed what came. It settled down at its own rate, two inches a year or not at all.

When Cissy dreamed herself into the cave, she felt the stone in her soul, the rock of her outrage. She knew who she was and where she belonged, the worth of her bones and the cadence of her heart. “Her place,” Dede would call it.

My country, Cissy thought, and in the dream the cave shaped around her as steadily as mud took on the imprint of her heel. In the belly of Little Mouth, Cissy put her hand into sand as old as the earth, extended her fingers, and was not afraid. Whatever she needed, that thing she would find. Wherever she should be, that place was where she was.

The shuffling struggle of the others washed over Cissy and did not matter, their panting and pushing, creeping progress, and yelps of fear. “Shut up,” she wanted to say, but didn’t. “Listen,” she did say sometimes. “Listen.” Jean and Mim would look around in confusion, hearing nothing of what Cissy heard, the pulse of the rock, the heartbeat of the planet, the echo of the unknown and the mysterious. One could see only so far and then the night took over, the great dark where anything might hide. Anyone. Someone like Cissy or someone so different she could not be imagined.

Caving for her, Cissy understood, was like sex for most people. Though what other people thought about sex was nothing Cissy really understood. But in the dark she became for the first time fully conscious of her own body and curiously unself-conscious. Unseen, she moved freely. In the dark her body moved precisely, steadily, each foot placed exactly, while her hips rocked loosely on the pistons of her thighs. Is this what California was for Delia? That unknown country where no one looked at her, no one knew her, and she could become anything she wanted, do anything without worrying about what others might see or think?

When Cissy dreamed about the trip from California to Cayro, it was a nightmare with coyotes howling out in the desert and the wind whipping in the smashed back window, blowing grit in her eyes and stink against her mouth.

“You didn’t stop to think about me, did you?” Cissy accused Delia in the dream.

“I thought.” The Delia in the desert nightmare howled out the car windows like a maddened animal. The real Delia never talked about the trip. “We’re going home,” she had said in that flat, stubborn voice Cissy hated. “I’m going home. You are going where I take you.”

“A hodag,” Jean told Cissy on their first trip. “A hodag is an animal that has legs shorter on one side than the other. Imagine. It can walk on steep hills without bending over lopsided. Can’t walk so good on flat land but moves fast on the steep.” She winked at Mim.

“Course, this advantage—it has another aspect. The hodag can travel in one direction only.” She spoke plainly without inflection or a smile. “It can never retrace its path, even when it tries.”

“Uh-huh,” Cissy replied. “Sounds like Delia to me.”

O
ne of these days, Amanda is going to pop like a balloon blown up too full,” Dede told Cissy. “Gonna go pop and spatter stuff all over Cayro. She’s just too damn full of her stuff, you know?”

Cissy nodded sadly. “And when she does, the one person who is not going to expect it is going to be Michael. He’s going to be standing there with Amanda all over him and never know she’s been squeezing herself down for him.”

“Maybe he’ll figure it out after she blows up at him,” Dede snapped. She had liked Michael when Amanda first started mooning over him, but from the day of the marriage Dede had steadily soured on Michael Graham and his open-faced, easy ways. “Can’t he see what’s happening? Amanda is like some black hole squeezing down tighter and harder all the time.”

“He loves her,” Cissy said.

“Yeah, and look how much good it’s done.” Dede was disgusted. “Love don’t fix everything.” She tugged at one of the little silver earrings Nolan had given her. “I can’t stand women who give themselves up so completely. They just make it harder for the rest of us.”

Amanda ignored her sister’s teasing, their jokes about how she was raising boys, not an army for the Lord. They don’t understand, she would think. Hers was an army for the Lord. Arguing with them, she never noticed how much like her grandmother she had become. Grandma Windsor chewed on Amanda Graham’s soul. Since the old woman had not shown up for her wedding, Amanda had tried once every few months to visit her grandmother. But the aging Louise Windsor treated Amanda as she had once treated Delia, shutting her door on her granddaughter whenever she went out to the farm. Amanda had taken the infant Michael out to the farm when he was six months old, but Grandma Windsor had hired a woman named Paterson to help her out, a red-faced middle-aged woman who turned Amanda away.

“Your grandma says to tell you she’s lying down,” Miss Paterson told Amanda. “Your grandma says to tell you she’s not feeling well.”

Amanda blushed to hear the woman speak those words, hearing in them a Christian woman bluntly determined not to lie. She did not say Grandma Windsor was sick or lying down. That would have been a lie. She said Grandma Windsor said it, and in those words Amanda could hear the echo of her grandmother’s rage at Delia. She loaded Michael back in the car and drove away, determined not to try to contact the old woman again, but at Christmas she sent a poinsettia and a box of the cookies she knew the old woman liked. It might have been a good Christian act, but in Amanda’s belly it felt like old-fashioned guilt. There should have been a way for her to reach the old woman.