Reprisal (7 page)

Charis lay back, lifted her knees, and was rough with herself down there. She was forceful with herself, but not enough so she bled.

She used to imagine she was submerged in a tank filled with dark-green water--and was slowly rotting in there, crumbling, with little pieces of her breaking off and sifting away. Spoiling under dark water in a tank made of glass. ... Old glass, with dirt and streaks of green on it, so she could barely see people looking in, and they could barely see her.

Charis felt something beginning to happen; she was so wet she could smell herself. And she tried to be gentler. It was foolish to be so rough, when it was only her and her.

... It had been one afternoon last summer--while she was working at Birch Lodge in the Shawangunks in New York--that she'd realized she was going to kill herself because of loneliness, would have to kill herself unless she went back to basics and started again from the beginning. Unless she did the work, all the research necessary to find out where the beginning was, and then put right what had been so wrong.

... And doing that, starting over, was already beginning to help. For example, it had helped with Greg. She felt absolutely comfortable meeting him on the library roof for brown-bag lunches or takeout dinner when he worked late, Tuesdays and Thursdays.--He was a part-time book stacker for the summer, a good on-campus job. They'd meet up there, afternoons or evenings, sometimes with other students working in the library, and sit on the flat, tarred roof in old worn-out deck chairs, looking out over the campus ... the hills.

She was even interested, now and then, in what Greg had to say. ... So she was definitely getting better, socially.

People--Rebecca, for example--thought she and Greg Ribideau were close.

Probably thought they had sex, which they hadn't, not after that once. Even though there was only a two-year difference, Greg was too young for her. He was a really young nineteen, like Rebecca, a baby. In fact, it was Greg and Rebecca who should be together. Rebecca liked him ... did a little girl's restless got-to-pee dance when the three of them met on campus on the way to class. Rebecca, small, sort of cute but not beautiful, was a soft girl. A daddy's girl ... without her daddy, now.

No more sex, no real sex, with Greg. It would be like being with a springer spaniel. Lots of whining and licking. There wasn't enough to Greg for anything serious. He wouldn't know what to do to her, whether she liked it or not. ...

Charis turned on her side, and made a pressing fist between her legs. That was better. Something was happening.

... But still, she could date Greg sometimes, eat lunch with him and talk about their classes. He was in two of her classes, a regular student at the college, like Rebecca--in summer session to make up credits to save school time later. Greg wasn't stupid.

They'd talked about their papers, Thursday. He was doing Willa Cather. Charis was doing James Gould Cozzens.

"A choice out of nowhere," Greg had said. He was eating a cheeseburger, which was what he always had for lunch. "Why Cozzens?" It was hot, the library's tarred roof--the students called it Tar Beach--radiating heat from the summer afternoon.

"Read Guard of Honor. He's an adult and he writes about men who are adults."

"Cather writes about adults."

"She writes about girls and boys. Mainly girls. ..."

Lying on her side was definitely better. Something was happening. ... One night, Rebecca, across the room, had wakened when Charis was masturbating, had wakened and must have thought she was sick. She'd said, "Charis ...? Charis, are you okay?"

And Charis had said, "I'm masturbating, Rebecca. I'm fine."

Rebecca hadn't said anything after that. Probably embarrassed. Just lay there in the dark and listened. At the time, Charis had been using a hard rubber dildo called the Black Bomber, and it was big enough to hurt her. It hit something inside, which she'd felt before, and hurt her.

Rebecca had said nothing for a few days about that middle-of-the-night thing--then she'd said something to Charis about supposing that doing that, playing with yourself, was healthy. Just another experience, and she supposed Charis knew a lot about sex ... had really been out in the world, not just a kid going to a college her mother taught at, for God's sake. From that, Charis knew that Rebecca had had no relationship yet. No serious fucking, for sure.

Just a dreamer. Just hopeful dreaming. ...

"Oh, I've been out in the world," Charis had said. "If you know the access codes and want to take the time, I think you can still find me on the Net."

Rebecca, sitting at her desk doing her first-year Spanish--a hard course--had said, "Find you?"

"Still see me on the Net, Becky.--I'm the six-year-old with the cock in her mouth."

Rebecca had stared as if Charis had just grown another head that didn't look like her at all.

"--See me doing that, and some other things. You'd be surprised."

Rebecca had looked surprised.

"I was there and in some magazine pictures, too. I was in Daddy's Daughter. I was in that one twice with just my white socks on--once with my father, Royce William Langenberg, and the next time with Philip and some other man. That time, I was eight."

Rebecca had bowed her head, said, "Oh, Charis ..." looked down at her Spanish book and started to cry.

She was a baby; that's all she was. She'd been crying for her father, too.

Crying at night. ... Charis closed her eyes, drew her knees up and worked harder, pressing, turning her fist back and forth. Her vagina ached. She was hurt, and made a sound. Then she straightened her legs under the sheet and arched her back and came at last. ... It was such a relief. Such a relief, it was worth the trouble.

The sheets smelled of her and sweat. Charis got up, changed the bed ... then put on her robe and went down the hall to the showers.

When she came back, she dressed in jeans and a maroon T-shirt, her windbreaker and her running shoes. She packed an overnight bag, left a note for Rebecca--Gone down to Boston, back tomorrow--and left. It would be a long nighttime drive upstate.

... The Volkswagen's worn top was down for the first of morning air, blowing summer into the car. There were too many trees too close over the road for dawn to come quickly; it was easing in through the birches and oaks, so Charis drove gradually into daylight.

She'd stopped twice--at a strip liquor store for the pint of vodka, hundred-proof ... then at Burleigh, at an all-night place, for gas and two chickenburgers--then had driven on up to Longford. ... There was no summer traffic on the roads, so far upstate and inland. Nothing to bring in tourists, unless they liked blue-necks' trash trailers in roadside clearings, and some tacky farms.--She'd been careful, never stopped at Longford the other times she'd come up here. Never asked anyone for directions, so she'd gotten lost twice the first time up, and once the time after that. But now she knew the way.

The old man must have memories to keep him so far out in the boonies. A past--past love or whatever--to keep him at Lake Chaumette, which wasn't even much of a lake ... keep him in an old fish-camp cabin with a woodstove, at his age. She'd seen him cutting wood for the last of winter, and now even for the summer evenings, cooled by the wind off the lake ... his old man's blood running thinner and thinner.

He slept under a quilt, too, lying still most of the night ... hardly moving, hardly turning at all, as if he were rehearsing for death. Charis had watched him sleeping, twice. He didn't snore, but moaned sometimes, dreaming like an old dog.

Charis had watched him from the woods in daylight, seen him walking around his place, doing something to a canoe up on sawhorses--repairing that, and doing other chores in brown corduroy pants and a checked flannel shirt. Daytime, he looked like a tough old man.--But at night, when she'd twice come into the cabin and stood by the bedroom door, he was only old, and moaned in his sleep.

Didn't smell like pee, though. Not yet.

What in the world did he think while he was out there stacking the woodpile?--that if he turned suddenly, his wife might be standing behind him, smiling? His wife alive again, and as young as when he'd fallen in love with her?

Old men's dreams. Sad zombie dreams they must be, trying to magic back moments out of some hour years before--remembering them so well, so perfectly, so much more clearly than yesterday's trip to the grocery. ... If there was a God, those memories wouldn't interest him at all. God would have seen all that, could go back and look again, anytime he wanted--trundle back down the railroad tracks of time. But people who thought he'd interfere with anything were kidding themselves. Strictly a spectator. Poor people down here were only TV for the angels--tragedy, comedy, porno, and farce. ...

Charis drove on Peabody Lane, past an auto junkyard and a cafe, a diner that looked like something out of an old movie ... shiny aluminum. The diner was closed. Peabody Lane ran right into Lake Drive, and Charis took a left there.

The drive ran along the lake, past ancient dented trailers--parked on tiny lots by the water and never moved again--and a few cabins looking not much better. Chaumette was a tacky old lake now, however fabulous and beautiful it might have been back in 1950. Probably still was 1950 to the old man. Then, it must have seemed that 1950 was the way things would be forever. ...

She stayed on the drive more than halfway around the lake, then slowed and turned right down an overgrown access lane cut through the woods. She pulled out of sight from the road into a sandy space where a cabin's basement had been dug and concreted years before. ... The project abandoned after that to encroaching tangles of berry bushes, birch seedlings, and the lakeside's weedy pines.

Charis turned off the VW'S engine and got out of the car. There were two condoms in the pine needles beneath a tree. They lay gray, wrinkled, and collapsed, the only things new since she'd been in the clearing three weeks before, and twice before that.

Charis leaned against the tree's rough bark. She could see only a dawn-lit narrow reach of lake through its branches. No one was out on the water this early, fishing or boating. ... She stood leaning there and closed her eyes.

The morning sun soon would rise enough for its light to touch her. Then she had the whole day to wait through. But since she'd been a little girl, she had found waiting a pleasure, relaxing, corridors of time as long and narrow as the view of Chaumette Lake, as still, empty, and restful.

Joanna drove the narrow scrub-choked track up Whitestone Ridge--going slow through hill-shadowed dawn, the Volvo's headlight beams, barely useful as sunrise came, swinging slowly half around each rising turn. The Newcombs'

farmhouse was a mile and more over the crest of the ridge; the car lights wouldn't be seen from there.

In the weeks after Merle Budwing's death, Howard Newcomb and the Midstate Grotto had come to an agreement--far from satisfactory to the cavers. Their extraordinary Concave to be gated and shut to all further exploration, with the Midstate to have first go if and when it was opened again, with Newcomb's insurance company and lawyers satisfied.--The Grotto had supplied the gate, installed it, and kept two of the keys in case of a sudden change of mind, or an emergency rescue of some kids breaking the gate and going down and into trouble.

Chris Leong, president, had one key. Joanna--rescue chairperson--held the other.

Near the top of the ridge, she cut her lights, drove the last short stretch by increasing morning light ... then pulled the Volvo up amid a stand of pine at the track's dead end, and cut the engine. The last nighttime crickets were still singing while a dawn breeze drifted through the birches below, the pines and hemlocks along the ridge.

There was no darkness left, up here.

Joanna got out of the car, went around to open the trunk, and began to unload gear. She took the static Blue Water out first--two big two-hundred-and-fifty-foot coils--broke the keeper knots, and slowly fed each line down into a separate rope sack.

It would have been convenient if they could have left a permanent rope rigged down, but that would have been too great a temptation to some break-in fools to try sliding down it, hand-over-hand. There was no man alive who could hand-over-hand down a forty-story rope, let alone climb hand-over-hand back up it. ... She'd have to rig the top two-fifty feet, then tie on the second rope, transfer to that to get to the bottom of the pit.

She would certainly be out of the Midstate Grotto on her butt if they knew what she was doing. And be unacceptable after that to any cavers in the country, for breaking a gate agreement with a landowner, then going down into a major cave alone and scooping booty--discovering new passages, virgin chambers, on her own, taking all those pleasures for herself. That, and endangering the people who might have to come after her in trouble, find her and get her out of there, dead or alive.

But there could be no rescue now, anyway, with no one knowing she was here. No rescue if she got caught in a squeeze, or trapped in a drowning pool, or broke her leg in a far passage miles under the ridge. No rescue. And afterward, no recovery of her body until the distant day some hiker or hunter, climbing high, found the car. ...

Joanna lugged the two rope sacks up through the pine woods, a steep climb with the bags' heavy weight among close evergreens that held and dragged at her.

Burdened, it was easy to trip on roots risen out of beds of pine and hemlock fronds, small fallen branches.

One hundred yards ... a little more than one hundred yards up, she smelled the cave's breath. Cool, cooler than the summer's morning air. Cool and damp, the setting-concrete odor of limestone wet with water. It was a clean slow breeze, with no smell of either life or death to it, and grew stronger as she climbed.

Soon she heard it, a soft hollow rushing sound as if the ridge were a beast of millions of tons, sleeping.

Joanna came out from under the low, brushing ceiling of foliage, and into brighter morning. The gate, in a crease of the ridge's stone shoulder, was made of steel rebar welded into a tall, narrow grid, hinged and set into concrete edging both sides of a ragged entrance more than seven feet high, slightly less than three feet wide.