Monday, Monday: A Novel (26 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Crook

BOOK: Monday, Monday: A Novel
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Madeline centered the flashlight’s beam on her father as if it were a tether that would hold him. He looked sturdy with his feet planted against the vertical rock. But where the rim lipped under, there was nothing to put his weight against. He bent and clamped the boy’s Jumar onto the rope, taut with the girl’s weight, fished one foot into the stirrup, and studied the frayed section of rope stretched over the edge above him. Carefully, staring up at the fray, he stood on the stirrup, testing if the rope would hold.

When it did hold, he released the tow strap and allowed it to swing free, committing himself to the frayed rope. One step at a time, revolving slowly as the rope spun, he walked down into the underworld.

Everything was in and out of the light now. The moon moved in the sky, the bats flew, the stars blinked into existence. Down below, the shaft of Madeline’s light pierced the dark void.

She heard the boy moving back and forth along the rim, but did not look at him. He had led them to this danger; he should be the one going down. Her father became smaller and darker, and finally the beam no longer reached him. “He’ll be okay,” Madeline whispered to herself. But that would depend on the rope.

A rock under her hand moved and skated off the edge. “Daddy,” she shouted, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” The rock made a small clap at the bottom. Her father’s voice, muffled by distance, echoed upward—“Everything’s all right”—and Madeline realized he wasn’t talking to her now. He was talking to the girl.

She heard their voices as he struggled. The rope creaked and twirled. Beside the truck, the boy talked to himself. Madeline dug her elbows into the rock, searching the dark with the light. The beam sputtered. She knocked the flashlight into her palm to bring it back to life. She could hear in their faint voices that her father had failed to lower the girl to the bottom and was trying to bring her back up. Slowly, out of the blackness, he appeared like an apparition, shouldering his way into the light, the girl attached to his harness, dangling just beneath him in her nest of dirty rope.

Inch by inch, he muscled higher, escaping the darkness, his rope swinging in and out of Madeline’s light. Watching his face take shape, Madeline felt hope.

Again, the flashlight flickered and dimmed. Again, she smacked it into her palm and angled it down to spotlight her father as he struggled upward. The light was all she could offer him.

As he neared the top, the girl’s weight pulling at him, his body buckled and quivered with the strain. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and gasped for air.

The girl he was hauling up from the depths was motionless, her mouth gaping. She was homely. Limp. She moaned, her head canted to the side.

“Amanda!” the boy shouted. Leaning over the edge, he scuffled dirt over the rim, a cloud of tan dust falling through Madeline’s light and into her father’s face.

“Get back!” Madeline shouted at him.

“Light…” her father gasped, “the tow strap.”

The dull light was his guide. She shook the flashlight hard, superstitiously now, and shined it at the tow strap.

But the strap dangled out of his reach. The rope supporting him groaned as it loosened and scraped at the rock. The smell of guano poisoned the air and made the night seem deeper. Hurry, Madeline thought.

Her father had come to the underside of the rim, and his Jumar and knots would go no farther up on the rope. He tried to worm them higher, but the rope clung to the rock as if it were welded to it. He bucked at it and managed to wedge his fingers next to the stone, but the rope ground at them and made them bleed, and he had to pull them free.

The boy talked to the girl. “You’re close now. You’re going to make it.”

Madeline wanted the courage to crawl closer and stretch out her hand to her father. She felt she could almost reach him. But even she and the boy together would not be able to pull him up over the three-foot rim. Only her father could solve this final hurdle. The only thing she could give him was the vanishing beam.

The boy cried out, “Amanda!” his voice shrill with panic. “Oh God, is she breathing? She’s not breathing!”

The girl suddenly pitched sideways, jerking Dan and jackknifing him backward. He tried to right himself, pedaling in the empty air while the girl swayed and rocked, her limbs flailing out from the ropes.

Swinging her light at the girl, Madeline saw her eyes were shut and her mouth was no longer gaping. Her jaw was clenched hard, as if she were thrashing and flailing in some terrible nightmare.

“She’s dying!” the boy cried. “She’s having a fit or something! Get her up! Oh God, get her up!”

Madeline watched her father struggle against the wild, haphazard movements. “Give me the tow strap,” he shouted.

The girl had become still.

The boy tried to pull at the rope, but it clung fast to the rock. The uprooted fingernail tore free of his hand and stayed upright on the edge of the limestone, balanced there like a moth’s wing.

“The tow strap…” Madeline heard her father gasp. “Shove it over!”

The boy slung it to him, but he missed it, and snatched again, and on the third try hooked it with his raw palm, pulled it closer, tied it to the ropes that held the girl. His arms twitched. His legs bore down on the loops. When he had tied the girl onto the strap, he jerked at the knot to test it, then wrestled his pocketknife out of his jeans. He struggled to open the blade. His fingers were bent at strange angles and his hands bled, so he pulled the blade up with his teeth. Blindly, he sawed beneath him at the rope connecting him to the girl. She was motionless, her knees doubled against her chest. The rope squeaked on the rim.

Finally the knife cut through and Madeline saw it fall from her father’s hand and disappear into the dark below. The girl fell away too, swinging wildly into free space, the tow strap catching her weight. She rocked there in her knotted nest, as still as a rag doll wrapped in knitted yarn.

“You’re going to make it!” the boy shouted. “You’re safe now!”

But how would they get her up over the rim?

“Daddy,” Madeline whispered. She wanted to see his eyes.

He swam his way back and forth and latched one hand onto the mass of ropes around the girl. “Pull,” he said to the boy, putting his shoulder up to the jumbled mess and trying to shove the girl upward.

The boy clawed at the tow strap, but it held taut against the rock, and Madeline’s father released the girl and let the tow strap have her. Her face was turned to the light. It was dirty. Narrow. Her eyes half-closed. He was alone now, on the rope.

“Here’s … what happens.” His voice was strained, foreign to Madeline—he didn’t sound like her father. His words were disjointed. “Madeline. Get in the truck. Set … the emergency brake. Pull the truck forward … Son, you get hold … of the strap and … guide your girl up over the rim.”

Madeline didn’t budge. “You said it would cut the rope if we drove.” The rope was his rope now. The tow strap was different. It was strong. It could hold. It would hold the girl.

Her father labored for breath as he spoke. “Be sure … the brake is set … Do you know … how to check it?”

“I think so. But you said—”

“It’s set,” the boy said. “Can you drive a standard?”

“Yes,” Madeline said.

“Be sure … about the emergency brake,” her father gasped. “It’s the smallest pedal … by the door…”

“I know where it is—”

“Push it … hard.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t use … first gear. Use second. Left … and down.”

“But the truck will jerk.”

“Doesn’t matter. First gear is”—he struggled to breathe—“too near reverse. Don’t stall … or drift backward. Give plenty … of gas. Let the clutch out slow.”

“Daddy?” Her voice was a choked whisper.

“Nice and … slow, Madeline.”

She tried to make her voice louder. “Daddy?”

“It’s our only … chance,” he said with a note of impatience now. He raised his eyes, looking directly into the yellow beam. “Madeline, honey?… Do this.”

She set the flashlight down at the edge of the hole and walked to the truck. The seat was too far back, but moving it could jolt the truck, so she left it where it was. Sitting forward on the seat, she pushed the emergency brake down hard with her foot, all the way to the floor. She pushed the clutch down, and turned the key. At first the truck refused her. It kicked and almost stalled before it idled. Her hands shook on the gearshift as she moved it left, then down. She pressed the accelerator and slowly, slowly, her legs trembling, took her weight off the clutch. Closing her eyes, she felt the grating spin of the wheels beneath her and heard the grind of rocks spewing backward into the hole. “Please. Please. Please.” She prayed for the rope to hold.

She felt the truck lurch forward, and heard the boy shout. She opened her eyes and realized she was several feet farther from where she had been. Flinging the door wide open, she ran back toward the hole. The boy was kneeling beside the girl, who lay on the ground in her mess of ropes like a creature caught in a net. Her arm rose up in the light, as if she were coming to life.

The grass moved in the breeze, making a whispering sound.

The flashlight lay at the edge of the hole, the pale beam marking the edge of the world.

The ragged, severed end of the rope her father had been hanging from curved lazily through upright tufts of speargrass sprouting between chinks in the mottled limestone.

 

29

NIGHT JOURNEY

In Carlotta’s shop, cross-sectioned slabs of transparent rock as thin as wafers dangled like chimes from the ceiling, peacock feathers arched from vases, smoke curled from sticks of incense. Books and figurines and bins of polished stones crowded the shelves along the adobe walls, rattling with vibration when trains clattered along the tracks.

Carlotta wore cowboy boots, a gauze skirt, and a flannel shirt. Her hair swung down her back from under her cowboy hat as she put her arm around Shelly and walked her through the shop to introduce her to friends and townspeople. Her high school principal and several former teachers were there, as well as Jack’s colleagues from Sul Ross and Delia’s friends from church. The cats that lived in the frame shop next door wandered over and ate scraps of sausage that people fed them.

When the party began to wind down, Carlotta invited several friends to the house, where they stood around in the kitchen, drinking beer and eating chips and queso. Jack and an old-timer went out back by the fishpond, long since dry and abandoned due to raccoons, and talked about real estate. Delia had recently converted the old cabin Carlotta had once used as a playhouse to a small guest house, and Shelly walked down the road to look at it, shining a flashlight in the wheel ruts and out across the bee brush and Spanish daggers and stalks of tall agave. Clumps of johnsongrass sprouted in the humped center of the road, and insects chirped in the tall grass along the edges. Night birds called from mesquite trees. In the distance, Lizard Mountain rose in the darkness; at night it was only a jagged pile of rocks jutting into the blue-black sky.

Rounding a bedraggled row of willows and a screen of bushy junipers she saw the cabin, milky white in the moonlight. She climbed the three small steps to the porch and turned the light on as she entered, illuminating a sparsely furnished room that still smelled of fresh paint. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she felt she shouldn’t have come to Alpine; she should have gone to Madeline’s play. She wished that Dan and Madeline would hurry up and arrive. Being here without them felt wrong. Something in general felt wrong.

By one o’clock in the morning, Shelly was pacing in her room at the house. She went through every plausible thought: Maybe they had run out of gas or the car had broken down. She called home to Austin in case they had turned around, but the phone only rang in the empty house until the machine answered with Madeline’s voice saying to leave a message. Jack called the local police and had them check with the Highway Patrol. They said there had been no accidents between Austin and Alpine. “Could Dan have taken a detour?” Jack asked Shelly.

“If he had, he would have called me by now.”

The minutes dragged on and on. She paced in the hall and back and forth on the porch, unable to stop moving. Carlotta stayed close to her, quiet and worried, but Shelly hardly felt her presence. She was alone with her fear. Delia sat by the phone in the bedroom. Shelly was pacing out in the gravel drive when she heard the faint ring of the phone inside and ran up the stairs to Jack and Delia’s room, with Carlotta behind her.

Delia was listening to a voice on the phone, her palm pressed to her face. She handed the phone to Shelly.

“Yes?” Her heart was pounding hard.

“Ma’am? I’m Stephen Cates, the sheriff in Rocksprings.”

“Yes.”

“I have your daughter, Madeline, here, and she’s all right. But…” He cleared his throat. “Well, ma’am. Your husband … He … he went down in Devil’s Sinkhole to help someone out, and his rope broke. He fell.”

“Is he all right?”

“No ma’am. He … he’s not. He’s … deceased.”

Jack took hold of her arm, but she was as stiff as a scarecrow.

“Your daughter needs to talk to you, ma’am.”

“Mom?” Madeline sounded four years old.

“Honey?”

“Mom?”

“Madeline, where are you, honey?”

“Mom?” Madeline’s voice trembled. “Mom? Daddy went down, to get a girl out, and…”

Carlotta took hold of her hand, and Shelly pulled it back and bent over, clutching her stomach. She kept her voice calm as she spoke into the phone. “Honey?” It wavered. “I’m coming to get you. Tell me where you are.”

“The hospital in Kerrville.”

“The hospital?”

“The basement. The morgue. Mom?”

“I’m here.”

“Mom?”

Jack took the phone. Shelly heard him talk to Madeline and then to the sheriff, heard him mention Devil’s Sinkhole. Delia left the room and came back with Shelly’s purse.

“Jack will take you,” Delia said. “Carlotta and I will take your car and meet you in Austin.”

Shelly caught hold of Delia’s hand. She wanted her comfort—her faith.

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