The Second Coming (29 page)

Screwed to the front, extending the length of the reservoir, oven and firebox, was what she could only think to be a towel rack, a heavy nickeled bar begrimed by grease and ash. No, not a rack for towels but for a wet wash on a rainy day! Unscrewing a can of Brasso ($2.05), which had an efficacious stink of ammonia and sulfur cream, she dabbed a clean rag (from a 1910 shirtwaist?) and scrubbed a length of bar. Under her hand the nickel winked in the sunlight like the sterling Ludean polished in the pantry on Saturday mornings.

She wrote in her notebook. For tomorrow: find rest of flue pipe in cellar. End of week: fit plastic pipe with sleeves and two elbows (one elbow under waterfall, other elbow over reservoir), string through laurels from waterfall to potting room (figure how to get pipe in without breaking a window: use hole in peak?). Slope is enough to permit a gravity flow yet gentle enough to rig a wire lift to stop flow: up equals stop, down equals flow.

The sun sank behind the pines. It must be four o'clock. Her back was cold. The dog stuck his muzzle under her knee. Let's start moving inside, she said to dog and stove. Working fast now with her wrenches, she unbolted the reservoir. The copper-and-iron box weighed as much as she but she didn't need hoist or creeper. She walked it, handling it downhill from corner to corner like the porter moving a steamer trunk from this very house. At the greenhouse porch she got it up (a hoist was too much trouble) and onto the creeper and zip, along silky cement to potting room. She eyed the sashes of the partition. Would the stove fit? Assuredly. The sashes worked. Better move stove from bottom up. Start with great nickel claw-and-ball feet, clean, reassemble, bolt to base, and build castle thereon stone by stone.

But, first, lay the Grand Crown over on its back, gently, using the block and tackle to pull it over and braking its fall with the half-inch nylon rappeled around the lonesome pine.

She looked at the sky. She figured she had a week.

VII

THE NEXT TWO HOURS
passed as swiftly as if his secretary, Miss Nabors, had walked into his Wall Street office and given him his appointment calendar.

After dressing in jeans, T-shirt, windbreaker, and tennis shoes, he went into the bathroom and emptied a bottle of Placidyl capsules into his hand, two handsful, one for each pants pocket—it was Vance Battle's prescription for his insomnia but he discovered he preferred lying awake—wrapped the empty bottle in toilet paper, crushed it with the Greener stock, flushed shards and paper. The plastic top wouldn't flush, so he opened a window and shied it into the gorge.

I could use about forty-eight hours' sleep, he thought. Then I'll be ready to wait and watch and listen. Then I'll take another little nap. And so on, until—

Sticking the flashlight in his hip pocket under the wind-breaker, he scooped up envelopes, went out into the hall and down the back stairs to the garage, got into his Mercedes, and drove to town.

He bought four fresh alkaline batteries for his flashlight, a roll of aluminum foil, a manila envelope, visited the post office, where he bought stamps from Mrs. Guthrie and had a conversation about the fog. You look like you're going fishing, said Mrs. Guthrie.

He was surprised. Fishing? Yes, something like that, he said. A fishing trip. She would report the conversation later, it and his cheerfulness.

Another thirty minutes and the envelope had been stamped and dropped in the slot, the Mercedes parked behind the bus station, and he was walking down the middle of number-fifteen fairway of the back eighteen.

The fog surrounded him. A hole in the cloud traveled with him. As he walked, the hole seemed to be still while the earth turned under him. Though he could not see the rough on either side, there was never a moment when he did not know exactly where he was. By dead reckoning he came onto number-seventeen tee, which loomed suddenly in the cloud like an Indian mound. The golf links was like his own soul's terrain. Every inch of it was a place where he had been before. He knew it like a lover knows his beloved's body. It was possible without looking to know that one particular spot on the tee, a patch of grass near the right blue marker, would be harder used than the rest, have more scuff marks, broken tees, tee holes, because the fairway doglegged to the left, so drivers teed up as far to the right as they could. He stopped and leaned over. It was even possible, he noted without surprise, to identify the exact spot, a tuft of grass with a bare spot behind it shaped like Arkansas, where he had teed up three days ago.

He walked straight to a pine tree near the edge of the rough. The trunk was bent into a flattened S. There had been a tournament over the weekend. Golf balls had bombarded the tree. Chips of bark littered the grass at the base.

The shell of a cicada hard as a gold bug had been clamped to the tree for three years. His fingers felt the slit in the shell where the creature had escaped.

It seemed to grow colder. Something else was different. Perhaps it was the silence that pressed into his ears. He looked at his watch. It was five o'clock.

It was only at this moment that he remembered his tryst in the summerhouse with Kitty. It was enough to bring him up short, but after shaking his head and smiling at it—perceiving, let us admit it, a mild pang of regret in the groin—he was on his way again. Who knows, he thought smiling, in one week, two weeks, I may be sitting with Kitty in the summerhouse enjoying the fall sunshine. Kitty's ass will keep for two weeks or for eternity.

Without further ado he walked quickly to the out-of-bounds fence, straddled it (no more ducking through), men moving more slowly, sidling through briars and laurel, came straight to the sassafras no larger than a shrub growing at the base of the ridge. It had fewer leaves now and they were more speckled. He picked a small one shaped not like a three-fingered hand but like a mitt with a thumb. As he sucked the stem, air stirred against his cheek. It was not cooler or warmer than the cloud but different. The cloud smelled of complex leaf rots, bark tannin, and funky anise from the gorge. The cave air was simpler. It had a wet metal culvert smell. He opened his mouth. Clean ferrous ions blew onto his tongue.

Pushing aside a branch of sassafras, he stepped into an inconsequential niche of rock which would have appeared as no more than a lichened recess even without the sassafras, then squeezed sideways through a crack (the Confederates were thinner, even, than he), in the same movement turning past a lip of rock as easily as stepping into the jogged entrance of a fun house, and was in the cave. It pleased him that the great cave should have such a banal entrance. Far below in the valley at the proper entrance to Lost Cove cave an underground river flowed into the sunlight through a cathedral arch of stone.

You disappeared, one second standing in a lichened niche, then a little jog and into the cave. Lewis Peckham said the entrance was too neat and therefore probably man-made or at least man-shaped, by the Confederates as an escape hole in case they got hemmed up below.

Down, down he crawled, letting himself feet first down a rockslide, first prone then supine because he needed the flashlight. There was no way, he figured, to go wrong going down. He wished for a miner's head lamp and, thinking of it, seemed to catch a whiff of acetylene. The slide leveled gradually and entered a crawl. Dry rock gave way to wet clay. The crawl was longer than he remembered, a good hundred yards. There were places where the ceiling came so close to the floor that he had to turn his head sideways like a baby getting through a pelvis. Progress could only be made by a slow scissors kick and rowing with his elbows. Once he got stuck. The mountain pressed on his back.

When the crawl opened suddenly into a chamber the size of a small theater, he stood and walked across as quickly as a man going to work, crossed the lobby of his office building, mounted a shelf of rock which fell away into another slide, longer but not as steep as the first. It was possible to go down standing, using the light and choosing his footing carefully. There was pleasure in planning each step, calculating distance and angle of rock and using his weight either to fetch up or to carry him onto the next step. It was not hard work but when he reached the stream at the bottom he was sweating. There was a curving beach of gravel. As he played the light into the clear shallow water, it was easy to imagine that it was a tidal rivulet. There were minnows. Perhaps they were blind. But when he shone the light up, it showed a glittering lopsided vault, one side sloping steeply to join a cliff across the stream. The glitter, he saw, came from needles of stone, each holding a drop of water.

Beyond a promontory crouched the three nuns, humpy becowled stalagmites. When the cave was open to tourists, there was a blue floodlight behind the nuns. Lewis said that what people liked was not nature but likenesses in nature. Rather than see stalagmites, they would rather see stalagmites that looked a little like nuns. There were also formations called the Old Man of the Mountain, and Honest Abe, and Marse Robert.

It took another hour to find the chimney. It began, he remembered, as a sort of flue above a tilted slab of a boulder. But there were many such slabs. Twice he passed the entrance to the lair where Lewis had found the tiger, but did not bother to enter. It was the chimney he was looking for. When he found it, the opening was higher than he remembered. Before he went up, he made sure to leave footprints of heavy wet clay in plain view on the rock. It took both hands to jump straight up into the dark and catch hold and double over onto a shelf of rock. The chimney was directly above, a rough skewed cylinder a yard or so wide. With each step up he had to wedge himself like a chimney sweep to free one hand and use the light to plan the next step. Could this have been another Confederate beaver hole to escape the blue tide? No, because at its top it opened not up and to the outside but to one side and into a small curiously shaped chamber elongated in one dimension but rounded top and bottom like a pod. Tiger bones had been found here too. A knob of rock the size of a hassock rose from the stone floor at the smaller blind end of the pod. It looked a little like the great flattened head of a tiger. One could even imagine the lip of bone on each side where the massive jaw muscle attached. Could the tiger's skull have fused into rock over the years, dripped on by jeweled drops and turned calcareous and huge? But no, it was a rock shaped vaguely like a tiger's skull, enough to allow the cave operator to call it the Sleeping Tiger. Lewis said the tiger had died here thirty-two thousand years ago.

Water dripped on one side of the chamber and filled a saucer of stone. Good! It would be uncomfortable and unnecessary to die of thirst. It was quite comfortable sitting against the curving wall. Head high, he found a dry alcove for the flashlight. Next to it he stood the four fresh batteries. Emptying his pockets of Placidyl capsules, he carefully lined them up on the floor and counted them. Ninety-six. The roll of aluminum foil fitted on the shelf. He could piss down the chimney but feces must be deposited on a square of foil, packaged, and put away, else he'd foul his own den. What had the tiger done?

He smiled. Here I am, he thought, folding his arms and nodding and smiling. Now. Now we'll see.

Who else but a madman could sit in a pod of rock under a thousand feet of mountain and feel better than he had felt in years, feel so good that he smiled again and snapped his fingers as if he had made a discovery? I've got you both, he said aloud, God-seekers and suicides, I've got you all, God, Jews, Christians, unbelievers, Romans, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Yankees, rebs, blacks, tigers. At last at last at last. It took me a lifetime, but I've got you by the short hairs now. One of you has to cough it up. There is no way I cannot find out.

Even if worst comes to worst, he thought with a smile, to suicide, it will turn out well. My suicide will represent progress in the history of suicide. Unlike my father's, it will be done in good faith, logically, neatly, and unobtrusively, unobtrusive even to the Prudential Insurance Company. Moreover, I shall arrange to be found.

What is more, it will advance knowledge.

His plan was simple: wait. The elegance of it pleased him. As cheerfully as a puttering scientist who hits on a simple, elegant experiment which will, must, yield a clear yes or no, he set about his calculations. The trick was to devise a single wait which would force one of two answers, not more, not less. If a yes, then to be able to leave and act on the yes. If a no, then to act on the no and at the same time euchre the Prudential Insurance Company out of the money he felt coming to him, to leave Sutter one million richer, and so to be found with the Placidyl gone from the floor of the cave but gone also from his blood. Lewis would find him eventually—

—Ah, to make doubly sure, drop a note down the chimney. He did:
Help!
he wrote.
With tiger, fifty feet above.
He frowned. That's confusing. They might not know which tiger. He wrote another note.
I'm fifty feet above this place and can't move. I think I've had a small stroke or an arterial spasm.

Vance Battle had told him about arterial spasms. They could mimic a stroke yet an autopsy would show nothing.

The second note he folded and dropped down the shaft.

Ninety-six capsules. Three a day could give him tranquillity for thirty-two days. Then he'd be too weak to move anyhow and yet live long enough to get rid of the drug.

This way everybody wins. God, if he exists, is not affronted. If he doesn't, Sutter gets the one million.

There will be plenty of time for asking God—that is called prayer!—between knockout drops. I am no hero! to sit here for a month and starve without a drug is too much of a bore to consider.

Speak, God, or be silent. And if you're silent, I'll understand that.

O ye mystics who go out in the desert and see visions, o ye old men who dream dreams, who believes you?

O ye suicides who go not so gently into that good nothing, you can't tell me either. But I've beat you both. In either case I'll know.