Reprisal (6 page)

But not, apparently now. "--I wonder if I could ask you one more thing."

"Okay."

"I wonder if you could tell me what you--what the fishermen think happened to my husband out there. He was a very good small-boat sailor."

"--What happened out there, him falling off her and so forth? I can tell you exactly what happened, Mrs. Reed. What happened was some goddamn thing he never expected. That's what happened. That's what kills sailors."

"Yes. ... Well, thank you very much for your help."

"Not much help," he said, and walked beside her, a strong impersonal hand at her elbow as she went to the gangway, and down it to the dock.

Joanna walked back up to the wharf and along it past the old chandlery, the ropewalk, and Manning's, to the street steps. It was a relief to climb up to Strand Street, to be getting away from the harbor, the sea--its salt smell, its sailing gulls and restless motion.

She walked through tourists down Strand to Slope Street. The warm day had become too warm to climb that steep lane comfortably in the suit, stockings, and silk blouse. Slope Street was narrow, cobbled, and had no sidewalks. The cobbles, brought in originally from a mainland quarry in the eighteenth century--replacements still imported from that quarry--had been kept for quaintness, apparently. Hard walking in high-heel shoes.

She climbed to the end of the street, high on Sand Hill, opened the cottage's low pine-stake gate, and went up the steps to the door. The cottage door was painted brown, and always had been. Joanna supposed those earth tones were a reassurance to returning fishermen that they had left the uneasy kingdom of the sea for the restful land. ...

She went upstairs to change, came back down in jeans and a T-shirt, and sat to work at the little pine desk in the living room. ... And what a relief not to have student papers to grade-attempts at poetry usually even grimmer than the attempts at prose. And White River students were supposedly an elite, cream of the crop. A chilling thought. ... Of course, there was an occasional talent, a Dave LaPlanche. Very occasional; Dave had graduated three years ago.

This early would-be triptych, now--three illustrative poems concerning women's lives-had never become a triptych. Might be called a biptych, since this contributed nothing. Written so many years ago--obvious, superficial, in a didactic light-verse trot--as if, in writing the first two poems, she'd learned better than to write another. The first had prepared for the second, and the second, reluctantly, for the third. But the third, this clumsy puppy, had never been trained to follow.

It's to time's ragtime rhythm the young girl Starts her slow stepping, swelling to unfurl. This child who weaved the early lace of life, What will she be after years make her a wife, Whose hips appeared at twelve and slowed her, Whose breasts came following lolloping after, Whose blood then spilled in leak and spatter, Whose childhood blurred then sagged to sugar? What but her selfhood purchased this growing? What spring of her past for future's flowing?

How wider her hips must straddle for seeding, With accomplishment seen largely in breeding, With what--in later, lonely years--to be left, But her exhausted self, of even child bereft? Would she better fitted for a life have been, Living selfish, humorous, solitary, and

slim?

Joanna worked all afternoon, rewriting, and didn't think of Frank very often.

There was no background sound. They'd never had a television over in White River, and there was none in the cottage. There was a radio in the living room, but she wanted no noise or music-particularly no music. Silence was the least disturbing sound. ...

She ate dinner in her bathrobe, standing at the kitchen counter. She had canned corned-beef hash, a fried egg, toast, and a glass of milk.

Dinner for one. And with no green vegetables, no yellow vegetables, no care for the health of a middle-aged husband careless of his health. All that had come to nothing. Wasted care. ... Frank could have had all the country sausage and pizza, all the steak and buttered baked potatoes he wanted. Could have smoked his cigars. ...

Joanna finished, with most of the corned-beef hash left over. ... And had decided to get farther away, for a day or so, from the treacherous sea --the sea, its sailors and fishermen still alive, disinterested in a dead soccer coach, a lover who'd made her laugh so many years ago, first instructed

--after a strangled Irish young manhood of swift drunken fucking--in the mysteries of her clitoris. Dead husband. Dead man. He was on that side now, and could never come over except in her dreams.

Joanna went down the kitchen steps, and around the back of the cottage to the garage's side door.

Her ropes and gear were hanging from pegs along the garage wall. A panoply of the elegant equipment necessary to travel and live beneath the surface of the earth. It was equipment a mountaineer or rock climber would use--but tougher, heavy-duty, made to accept unacceptable conditions of wet stone, crumbling stone, mud, fast water and abrasion.

These beautiful slender snake-skinned ropes, the gleaming links of aluminum or steel, the climbing and descending tools were, with courage, the keys to a world of darkness beneath the world of light, so she'd been able to live two lives, where most men and women lived only one. ... Like many cavers, she'd been a concealing little child, happy hidden behind sofas or beneath the stairs, exploring the basement for what might be behind shadows, whatever found in darkness. She hadn't been afraid of the dark.

On vacation after her freshman year at Radcliffe, she'd gone with a young man to New Mexico--a golden boy, Curt Garry, she'd been too careless in loving.

They'd met at a dance at Dartmouth--both conscious of their cleverness, beauty, youth, and luck. Conscious even--at least she had been--of the picture they made together. A slender and active girl, dark-eyed, her long hair a rich and glossy black--and a tall lean hazel-eyed boy, old-fashioned in his angular good looks, his hair bright as sun-struck straw.

Too perfect a picture for them to fulfill.

Joanna had enjoyed the boy, the high-desert sun and sunlight, and had been invited by Curt's uncle down into the Lechuguilla cave, a very special favor.

Lechuguilla contained the most beautiful series of cave chambers yet found on earth. And in those glittering spaces--snowy, delicate, spun with frosted calcite lace and fantastic in limestone chandeliers, exquisite decorations jeweled by millions of years--Joanna had fallen in love with under-earth. With the earth's secrets, as a little child found comfort and mystery both, beneath its mother's skirts.

Muddy, exhausted, and badly frightened once-crawling through a narrow squeeze that seemed to contract its stone walls around her, press her breathless--she had found herself at home. ... She found caving, and later in the year lost Curt Garry--who ran from her like a rabbit--and lost forever a certain regard for herself as well.

But after that, she had caved every chance she got. Below the earth seemed more important than above it, and she enjoyed the company of cavers--odd adventurers all, with that interesting combination of hard common sense and risk-taking seen in mountaineers, rock climbers, and pilots. Like poets, they saw life as a temporary opportunity, to be taken full advantage of.

--Curt's mother, who'd liked Joanna, had called her seven years later. Still single, an attorney with a Chicago firm, he'd died of lymphoma ... had asked his mother to call, and sent love. ...

Blue Water ropes, Pigeon Mountain ropes--all wonderfully light, slim, and strong--were hanging high on the garage wall in rich thick color-banded coils.

Some of it static rope--tough and inelastic for long, long rappels down into darkness ... and then the endless climbs returning, working back up that single thin, sheathed strand of nylon. Stepping up, rope-walking, with two or three cammed ascenders each sliding up the line in turn, then gripping ...

sliding up, then gripping ... so the caver, attached to them, traveled like a great slow spider back up the hundreds of feet he'd sailed down so lightly.

Then a different rope for risk climbing, lead climbing for rock climbing to depths beneath the earth. A dynamic line, more fragile, with stretch enough under shock to cushion a sudden fall. Giving ... giving to prevent a smashed pelvis, a broken back, or snapped harness straps and a fall all the way.

A screamer, cavers called that fall, though Merle Budwing had shouted, and only once, as he went.

Hanging coils of rope, and below them the parachute-buckled black webbing straps of sit harness and chest harness. Her new harness--and her old set and helmet, brought out just in case she might persuade Frank down a shallow sea cave along the coast. ... The bright red PVC equipment and supply packs hung from pegs to the side, one loaded with web-tape cow's-tails, tape slings, an etrier--that useful thick nylon strap sewn into a four-loop ladder--and batteries, flashlight, lighters, and Cylume sticks for emergency backup light--along with freeze-dried food bars, Super Leatherman multitool, and small hand-pumped water filter.

Another pack contained the neat machinery for movement up and down the rope.

Cammed ascenders --yellow Jumars, Gibbses, and Petzl Crolls, with their nylon-webbing attachment straps and bungee cords--and the Simmons chest-harness rollers to run the rope through, hold the climber upright against the line. ... Then the rappelling gear, to control descent by friction. A bobbin, with twin small pulley-wheels to slow the rope as it fed through. And, for longer drops, a rack--a fourteen-inch miniature steel ladder, with movable little aluminum rungs to cramp the rope sliding over and under them as the caver sailed slowly down.

The smallest pack held a Suunto compass, canteen and folding cups, pocket notebook and pencil, toilet paper, small plastic shitsacks, and a first-aid kit.

... Ranked along higher pegs on their nylon-webbing slings, the carabiners jingled softly when Joanna lifted them down. Petzl Spirit 'biners, most of them, elegantly spring-gated links, D's and C's of fine forged aluminum to run rope through, to tie it to, or connect descenders and ascenders to her harness. The carabiners--and, ringing more brightly, three stainless-steel maillon connectors, strong screw-links in two half-rounds and a triangle.

There was nothing there--no carabiner or length of rope, no nylon-webbing tape in her packs, no cammed ascender, Gibbs or Petzl, no friction descender, bobbin or rack--that had not held Joanna's life safe many times suspended in lamplit darkness within chambers too deep, too huge, ever to be seen entirely.

Great rooms beneath the earth and sunlight of America, of Mexico, of Jamaica, of Borneo.

In years of caving, she had learned to rock climb--lead or belay--to deal with stone-fall, packed mud, narrow squeezes, to deal with cave river duck-unders.

To deal with fear. ... She'd learned to rig, to prusik up the rope, rappel down it--and change, in mid-rope over emptiness, to either. She could, if necessary, do these things --and other rigging, for rescues, much more complicated --while beneath a cave's icy and battering waterfall, or in perfect darkness. She had learned to trust her gear, but back it up--and to dress and set every knot she made. ...

Joanna opened the Volvo's trunk, laid the heavy rope-coils carefully far back, away from possible damage by spills or anything sharp or snagging, then lifted in the PVC equipment packs, two big rope sacks-to hold the lengths of line suspended beneath her, rappelling--her sit and chest harnesses, her helmet and its attached lamp--electric, not carbide--a spare helmet lamp and two spare sealed lithium battery packs.

Her boots--greased Redwing Red Setters-and her old jeans, work shirt, sweater, and blaze-orange ballistic-nylon coveralls were in the cottage hall closet with the sleeping bags. The evening ferry, the last ferry, left at dark.

Charis, masturbating, pretended she was lying beneath Greg Ribideau. Beneath a boy, even pretending, was a good place to think. She supposed women often used beneath as a place to consider things.

Alone in the room, she lay under her sheet with her jeans and panties off. She lay with her knees up and spread as wide as she could, her socks on. "We do that, first thing," Mr. Langenberg had said to her many years ago. Said it only a few days after Margaret Langenberg had died.

Charis had had no real sex with Greg Ribideau. The only sex they'd had, and only once, she'd done. He'd just sat on the bed in her room, and she'd unzipped his pants and jerked him off into her other hand. Greg had been in heaven, coming in her hand.

He'd stayed for a while after that, and Charis had gotten her pint of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie from the common-room refrigerator. They'd had a mysterious ice cream thief in the dorm for a while, even though most of the summer students were graduates, and older, and should have been able to buy their own.--She and Greg had finished the pint of Fudge Brownie, then he'd kissed her and left, supposing they were serious lovers with a future.

But now he knew better ... and it seemed to Charis he was relieved. She'd only known him the few weeks since she'd registered at White River for the graduate program, and started summer classes. He'd come over to her table at the cafeteria, said "Okay?" and sat down. "I don't know how to begin with you,"

he'd said. "I'm shy. Andwitha beautiful girl, I'm very shy."

Charis had kept eating her egg-salad sandwich.

"--But I've been watching you in The American Novel ... and I finally couldn't help myself."

He was a nice-looking boy, maybe two years younger than she was. Tall, with pale-brown curly hair already hinting at receding. Soft blue eyes, almost a girl's eyes.

Charis had finished her sandwich. "What's your name?"

"Greg. Greg Ribideau."

"Well, I'm shyer than you are," Charis had said, then stood, picked up her tray, and walked away. She'd tried being with boys ... with men, really. Just four of them in the seven years since Mr. Langenberg died. She hadn't enjoyed it.

Then, when she'd been thinking of killing herself so as not to be so lonely, she'd gone to bed with a girl, Margaret Gowens--but also for a purpose, for information from the agency. That sex, with the softness and slipperiness and hugging, had just been unbearable.