Jessie and I both giggled, but Matthew’s mouth dropped open. “It did not!”
Rossi held up a hand. “Do not argue with wise Indian sense.”
“Why would you think such a stupid thing anyway?” Jessie said.
Matthew looked at the ground and kicked at a rock. “I don’t know. The movies.”
“You need to watch better movies,” Rossi said.
Matthew sulked while Rossi continued studying the map. “I think the petroglyphs are this way,” she said.
As we worked on climbing over a large slanted boulder, Matthew said, “So Rossi, you never did tell us about your worst day.”
Rossi pursed her lips, concentration on her face, as she clung to the side of the boulder. “You don’t have to,” I told her.
We slid down the boulder then walked quietly for a few minutes before Rossi finally said, “I lived on the reservation until last year. My mom died when I was four, so my dad mostly raised me. We didn’t have much, but that was okay. Back then he spent a lot more time with me. He taught me how to ride a dirt bike. Taught me how to fix a dirt bike. Taught me everything I know about them. He was a great rider and wanted me to be just like him.” She laughed. “He even started a Tohono O’odham chapter of this national motorcycle club for Indians. Riders would come from all over for our powwows. It was so much fun.”
Rossi cleared her throat. “And he always called me his little Rossi.” She glanced at Matthew. “Because Rossi is the best.”
Matthew smiled at her. “I think so, too.”
She cleared her throat. “Anyway, he said that he and I were going to go on a great adventure on motorcycles. That we would make it all the way to Baja. Then one day a boy we knew, a friend of mine, got thrown into the Center. He didn’t even do anything all that bad. He didn’t hurt anybody. Not like Bo does. He’s actually really nice. He just had some tough stuff going on in his life that he tried to get away from. I don’t understand why he’s being punished so harshly.”
“I know why,” Jessie said. “For the same reason we have to plan for an extra hour of travel every time we come back from visiting my aunt in Bisbee.”
“Why?” I asked him.
Jessie shook his head at me. “Border patrol, Gus. They search our car and make us show proof that we’re citizens. Every. Single. Time.”
“My dad gets stopped a lot, too,” Rossi said. “I’ve heard him gripe about it making him late for work.”
Jessie snorted. “They probably can’t even tell the difference,” he said, his voice tight and angry—not at all like he usually sounded. “All they see is a brown person in a junky car.”
I swallowed. What could I say to that? Nothing. There was nothing I could say.
We kept walking. “My dad was so angry when that happened. I’d never seen him so angry. The next day he went down and registered at the college for the social work program.”
Rossi cleared her throat. “After he took the job at the Center, he sold his bike to pay the deposit on our apartment in Casa Grande, so that was the end of that. No more riding together. No more motorcycle club. No more powwows. It was like he stopped caring about anything, and anyone, but those boys. Then all it took was our car breaking down once, and we couldn’t make our rent. After a few months, we ended up here. And the day we moved here, to this town. I gave up hope of ever going back. That day . . . that’s my worst day.” She stopped and looked over the map for a moment. “I miss my home. I miss my friends.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I hate it here,” she added in a whisper.
We followed her quietly for a while, all of us lost in thought. I wanted to understand what Rossi and Jessie were talking about, wanted to see the world through their eyes, but I had a feeling I never could.
I looked at Rossi walking beside me, checking the map every now and then. “I’m sorry your mom died,” I said.
She shrugged a little. “I can hardly remember her. I think I was too young to fully understand what it meant. That she was really gone forever. And I hate that I can’t remember her better. The only things I really remember . . .” she trailed off.
“What?” I asked.
Rossi cleared her throat. “I remember we used to play tóka together.”
“What’s that?” Matthew asked.
“It’s an O’odham game.” Rossi raised an eyebrow. “For girls only. Sorry, guys.”
I laughed. “How do you play?”
“It’s like field hockey,” Rossi said. “But not. It has more meaning. I remember being the youngest girl on the field. The other women said I was too young, but my mother told them not to underestimate me. That I was deceptively strong. And there was this one older girl who kept trampling all over me. I told her to lay off, but she wouldn’t stop. She was just a bully picking on someone smaller than she was. I’ve seen them my whole life. Finally I hit her with my usaga so hard she rolled in the dirt. She left me alone after that.”
“What’s an usaga?” I asked.
“It’s a mesquite branch. All the playing pieces come from the desert.” Rossi smiled. “And I remember the song we used to sing before a game.” She hummed a few notes. “I remember how our house smelled. Like creosote oil and fresh bread and saguaro fruit jam cooking on the stove. Now my house smells like . . . like no one lives there at all.” She stared at the map and swallowed. “Anyway, that’s what I remember.”
“I love the smell of creosote when it rains,” I told her. “Sometimes I’ll pick a piece of it and carry it around with me so I can sniff it every now and then. It makes me feel like it could rain.” She didn’t look at me—just kept staring at the map. But I saw her smile just a little bit.
“How come guys can’t play tóka?” Matthew griped. “The girls worried they’ll lose?”
Rossi’s smile broadened. “They would absolutely crush you, Matthew. Kind of like I do at racing.”
Jessie threw his hand over his mouth and pointed at Matthew. “Ohhhhh. She got you.”
Suddenly I saw something familiar behind Jessie. “Hey, I think I’ve seen those rocks. They look like a snowman. And that one over there looks like a stack of tires. We’ve definitely been here. I think the petroglyphs are this way.”
I kept looking for familiar rocks until a couple of bats flew over our heads. “Okay,” Rossi said, her voice unsteady. “We must be going the right way.” Then she ran ahead of us a bit. “Here!” she called. “They’re here!”
“Wait, Rossi!” I cried, but it was too late. I was down, the rocks tearing the skin on my hands as I tried to brace myself. Matthew and Jessie helped me up, and we joined her at the petroglyphs, stumbling over the rocks with the limited light.
“You can’t run off with the light,” I told her.
“Sorry, Gus,” she murmured, completely focused on the wall. She pointed at the arrow. “So we should go in this direction, I think.”
We followed her for a few minutes until we made it to a dead end in a small room of the cave. “We’d better turn around,” I said. “We must have missed something.” Then one wall of the room caught my eye, and I stood there, shining the flashlight on it, mesmerized.
“That’s really weird,” Matthew said, standing beside me.
“Hey,” Jessie said. “It looks like a dude.” He walked toward the wall. “Like a face.”
“It looks like. . .,” Rossi said, shining the flashlight on it.
We all tilted our heads a little to the side and said in unison, “Abraham Lincoln.”
“Look.” I outlined it with my finger. “There’s his beard, his top hat. There are even two holes where his nose is. There must be something in one of those nostrils!”
Matthew nudged Jessie forward. “Go stick your fingers in his nose.”
Jessie’s head shot back. “No way. You stick your fingers in Abraham Lincoln’s nose.”
“No, you,” Matthew said. “Come on. You know you want to. Pick it.”
“You pick it.”
“Pick it. Pick it. Pick it,” s
aid Matthew while Jessie repeatedly told him no.
“Maybe Gus should pick it,” Jessie finally said.
“I’m not tall enough to reach in there,” I said. “How about you guys choose a number between one and ten?”
“One,” said Matthew.
“Ten,” said Jessie.
“Jessie gets to pick the nose,” I said.
Jessie groaned as he hesitantly slipped his hand into the hole. He yelped and pulled it back out. “There’s something in there!”
“Maybe it’s a giant booger,” Matthew said, laughing.
“Just reach in and pull it out,” I told him.
Jessie reached in again and then quickly pulled his hand out, a dirty, holey, cowboy hat in his hands.
We all looked at one another excitedly. “Is there anything else in there?” I asked.
Jessie threw the hat down and reached his hand back into the hole. He grunted as he stretched as far as he could go. “I think so,” he said. He finally pulled his arm out, a small wooden box in his hand.
“Whoa,” Matthew said. Jessie ran his fingers over the initials engraved on the box—W.A.D., just like the watch. Jessie unclasped the box and opened it.
“No,” I breathed.
It was empty.
“I knew it,” Jessie said. “I knew we shouldn’t have come here.”
“We still haven’t checked the other hole,” I said hopefully.
Jessie handed Matthew the box and reached his arm into the other hole, his eyes clenched shut. “There’s something in this one, too.” He grunted as he pulled his arm out, a wadded up cloth in his hand. “It’s heavy,” he said as he unraveled it.
Jessie let out a huge squeaky breath as he saw what was under it: an old pistol. “Oh my gosh,” he said in shaky whisper, his hands trembling.
We stepped back instinctively. “Jessie,” I said as the pistol started sliding from the cloth. “Be careful. You don’t want to —”
But then he dropped the gun and a loud explosion filled the cave.
The three of us covered our ears and ducked as Jessie screamed. Once I knew for sure I wasn’t going to be hit and my ears stopped ringing enough that I could hear, I ran to Jessie.
He was jumping around howling. I grabbed at his flailing arms. “Are you okay?” I kept yelling, but he didn’t hear me.
Rossi picked up the flashlight and knelt on the ground at Jessie’s feet. She attempted to hold his leg while he writhed around. “Stop it!” she shouted at him. “Calm down.”
Matthew and I grabbed his arms and tried to keep him steady while Rossi inspected his foot. “I shot myself, man! I shot myself!” He threw his head back and wailed in a way that made me fear he had shot off half his body.
Rossi held his foot in her lap—a tiny corner of his sneaker had exploded, and red was already spreading from the site of the explosion.
Rossi looked up at me. “I don’t think it’s too serious.” She looked unsure. “I’m going to take your shoe off,” she told Jessie.
“No!” Jessie screamed. “Don’t touch it!”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do.”
“We need to get out of here,” I said. “He needs a doctor.”
“I can’t!” Jessie wailed. “I can’t walk!”
I turned to Matthew. “We’ll have to help him.”
“I can’t walk through this cave,” Jessie whimpered. “I want my ma. I want to go home.”
“We’re going home,” I told him. “We’re going back to where the pigs came from. There’s got to be a way out there. It’s not far.” Jessie continued his whimpering and wailing. “Wasn’t there anything else in the holes?” I asked him, but he was too hysterical to answer.
Without having to ask, Matthew reached in and felt both holes. He didn’t need to say a thing. His face told me everything.
“This was all for nothing!” Jessie cried. “This is so much worse than if Andy Letterman had been here! No gold! I told you guys we shouldn’t come! I’ve shot myself for nothing!”
“You need to calm down,” I told him, doing my best to forget my own crushing disappointment. We needed to focus on Jessie now. “We’re getting out of here.” I pulled his arm over my shoulder. “We’ll help you.” Matthew pulled Jessie’s other arm over his shoulder. “We’re your crutches.”
“Rossi.” She turned to me. “I’m sorry. I really thought it would be here.”
“It’s okay, Gus,” she said. “I did, too.” Her face was filled with fear. I knew what she was thinking. What if we were stuck in here? Stuck in here and now Jessie was injured. And who knew how much life was left in that flashlight. Jessie was right. This was all for nothing. I could have just killed us all.
“We’ll follow you,” I said.
Rossi shined the flashlight on the map. “Okay,” she said. “We go this way.”
Matthew and I held on to Jessie as he hopped on one foot through the cave. It was tough and slow going making it over the boulders and rocky ground and tight spaces with Jessie injured.
Rossi frequently checked the map, but before long, our surroundings were looking different. In a bad way.
I stopped. “I don’t think we’ve been here before.”
Rossi turned in a circle, shining the flashlight all around us. “I don’t think so, either. I think . . . I think I led us the wrong way.” She looked at the map, and I noticed how it shook in her hand. She dropped it down by her side. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her eyes squeezed shut. “I don’t know where we are on this thing.”
I took a deep breath. “It’s okay. We’ll just go back. We must have made a wrong turn somewhere.”
We turned around and went back the way we came, but after a while I realized something.
dire: dreadful, frightful, alarming
We were lost. We had no idea where we were in this cave. We had limited light and hadn’t been looking for familiar landmarks like we should have been. We thought the map would guide us. We were all too scared and focused on Jessie to have noticed we were making wrong turns. We could wander here forever. And soon, we’d be in the dark.
“We need to keep moving,” I said. “How big can this cave be?”
The ground under my feet was far less rocky and had turned into a sort of crackled clay. I reached down and touched a finger to it—the dirt was fine and red. I looked up at Rossi. “Do you think there used to be water here?”
“I’ve only seen this kind of ground in dry lake and river beds,” she said. “It’s silt.” She looked at the map. “I think maybe we might be here.” She pointed at something on the map that looked like a river. “If it used to be a river, maybe it leads outside.”
We continued walking along the crackled ground, hoping it led somewhere, anywhere.
“Maybe we’re going deeper into the ground.” Matthew breathed heavily and his voice trembled. “Maybe we’ll get too close to the earth’s core and it will get too hot and it will burn us to death.”
Jessie made scared, wheezing sounds beside me.
“It’s not hot,” I said. “We’re not going to the earth’s core. And that’s not helping.” I stood there a moment. “Actually . . . I feel a slight breeze.”
“You’re crazy, Gus,” Jessie cried. “You’ve lost your mind.”
I let go of Jessie and walked to Rossi. I grabbed the flashlight from her and pointed it at her head. It flickered, and we all gasped.
I tried to focus on Rossi’s hair. I remembered how it had blown back from her face when she’d first opened the hole in the mine wall. A few thin strands of hair lightly lifted and blew in the direction we had come from.
“I think your Indian sense was leading us in the right direction,” I said.
“How can you joke at a time like this?” Jessie said, but Rossi just stared at me.
She licked her finger and held it up. “I feel it.”
Except for the sounds of Matthew’s heavy breathing and Jessie’s whimpers, we walked quietly in the direction of
the breeze.
And then Rossi stopped abruptly in front of us. I let go of Jessie and walked up beside her. She pointed the flashlight straight ahead. “Oh. No,” she said.
“What is it?” Matthew asked. He walked up next to us, Jessie hobbling by his side. “Shoot,” Matthew whispered.
I swallowed, and, despite the extreme humidity in the room, my throat felt like the dried up skeleton of a saguaro cactus. We had reached the big, dark, shaded area.
“We’re all going to die,” Jessie said.
I shined the flashlight across the glassy blackness of the large lake in front of us. The light flickered, and I smacked it. I picked up a pebble and tossed it. It made a loud echoing plop, and the black sheet rippled like it was made of satin. I turned the flashlight off.
A moment later, we were in darkness. The ceiling came down very low over the center of the lake, and I knelt to see under it. “Do you guys see that?”
I waited a little while as our eyes adjusted to the dark.
“I see it,” Rossi said, crouching down beside me.
“What?” Jessie asked. “What do you see?”
“Light,” Rossi said.
“Where?” Matthew asked.
“On the other side of the lake,” Rossi said. “You have to get down to see all the way across because the ceiling is so low toward the middle.”
I turned the flashlight back on. It flickered again. I saw that Rossi’s eyes were wide with fear. “Can everyone swim?” I asked.
“I can,” Jessie said, leaning against Matthew for support. “Sometimes we swim at the pool in Casa Grande. But I don’t think I can right now because of my foot.”
“I can,” Matthew said. “A little anyway. Jacob used to have a pool at his trailer before it broke and flooded his yard a few years ago. The pool, I mean, not the trailer. I think his dad built it out of tarps and pipes or something crazy like that. You learn how to swim pretty quickly when Bo is there to dunk you when you’re not paying attention. It’s been a couple of years, though. I think I can remember. I mean, I hope I can. We played Marco Polo a lot—you say Marco and the others are supposed to say Polo. You have your eyes closed so it’s like being in the dark. So I think I can.”
24 Hours in Nowhere Page 11
