Dream Man

by Judy Griffith Gill

  “No. Are you?”

  “My foot’s caught. Can you slide ahead, out from under me? Go easy, Jeanie. Shine your light first and see what’s there.”

  What was there was the larger cavern, the small scrap of red that looked like the bent elbow of a sleeve just protruding from behind a rock and a tiny, glittering creek sliding down a wall to form a little pool close to her extended left hand. She was torn so strongly between wanting to go to that small splotch of red that was so terribly still and wanting to help Max, that she yearned to be able to cut herself into two pieces. Gently, she slid forward, then got to her knees and turned to shine the light back over Max. One of his feet was buried under a pile of what appeared to be small, loose rocks.

  “I think I can dig you out,” she said, setting her pack aside, struggling to free one of the straps of his pack that was pinned under his hip. Whatever she found when she went to Jason, she was going to need Max. “Let me know if I hurt you.”

  “I’m not hurt, just stuck.”

  With her bare hands, she tore at the rocks, and soon his foot was free, having been well protected by his strong leather boot. Jeanie scrambled around the outcrop of rock where the red thing was and let out a cry of utter despair.

  “Jeanie, sweetheart, what is it?”

  Max caught her around the waist and swung her aside, flashing his light over the site. There, lying on a broad, dusty ledge, was a bright red sleeping bag, the very one she had bought Jason for his ninth birthday fourteen months before. There was a bag of cookies, a can of pork and beans and stack of comic books sitting nearby.

  Of Jason, however, there was no sign at all.

  “Come on,” she said, scrambling up off her knees. “He’s in this cave somewhere! We can find him, Max! He’s here! I know it! He must be hurt in one of the other passages. Help me, Max! I have to find him. I must know if he’s safe!” One more time, she raised her cracking voice and called out desperately, “Ja—son!” and was met with nothing more than a hollow echo.

  Max held her tightly against him, his flashlight held steady as he turned in a slow circle. “Jeanie, he isn’t here. There are no side passages.” The light came to stop on the fall of rubble that marked the passage through which they had entered the cavern.

  Jeanie felt horror rise up inside her, felt a scream of pure terror building and building even as she battled to hold it within. Her entire body went rigid with terror, and she shook as sweat popped out on her skin. “My Lord! Oh, my Lord, we are in here, and there’s no way out!”

  Chapter Eight

  IN THE BEAM OF HIS FLASHLIGHT, Max saw Jeanie’s expression of horror, and he held her more tightly. Sweat ran down her face, smearing the dirt encrusting her skin, making small tracks like tears, but she did not weep. “There has to be a way out,” she whispered hoarsely, tearing herself free of him, going to the wall behind her nephew’s sleeping bag, flashing her beam over it. If there had been a passage there, it was now filled with what appeared to be the same kind of fresh rock fall that blocked the one through which they had entered.

  Suddenly, before he realized what she was doing, she began to run, crouched over to avoid the low ceiling of the cavern. She beat at the solid stone with her hands, casting her flashlight beam this way and that, sobbing harshly but without tears. She splashed into the little stream, across the tiny pool and out the other side, and begin digging frantically at the loose rubble where Max’s foot had been caught. More rock began to fall, a large boulder breaking loose from the wall near her head tumbled into the pool, splashing water over her filthy yellow slicker.

  “Jeanie, no. Stop!” He grabbed her and held her, dragging her back to the only part of the cave where he could stand erect. “Take it easy. We’ll find a way out. Stop panicking. Sit down for a minute. Rest. Get out of those wet shoes.”

  She fought him, the terror of being in an enclosed space overwhelming her. She didn’t just want to dig. She needed to dig! There wasn’t enough air. Her labored breathing rasped in and out, fast, too fast. She struggled against his hold, her eyes wide and unseeing, her mouth agape as she gasped for air she was not getting. Her old horror of suffocation was now the most powerful emotion within her, and she saw Max only as one more obstacle to bar her way. She clawed at his face, kicked at his shins, writhed in his clasp, and continued panting, hyperventilated and reeled with dizziness.

  Max, recognizing hysteria, stood her away from him, drew back one hand and swung, but let the blow fall short. He could not slap her. Instead he kissed her, holding her head between his hands while she fought him and her fear and the enormity of their circumstances. Finally, when she went limp and leaned against him, he gathered her close and rocked her from side to side, listening to the harshness of her gasps, aching with the need to free her from her terror.

  She gulped in a couple of shivery breaths and slowly nodded, her eyes wide and silvery in the light.

  Just as slowly, he eased his tight grip on her until he held her only by the upper arms.

  “All right?”

  “All right,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I panicked.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It can happen to anyone.” He turned off his flashlight, and she gasped as the value of the light was decreased by fifty percent. Taking her hand, he led her over to the sleeping bag and unsnapped the rain gear that had protected her for so many hours. Setting her flashlight on a rock so its beam reflected off the yellow of her coat rather than got swallowed up by the black, coal walls, he tugged the slicker down over her shoulders and laid it aside. Seating her on the edge of the sleeping bag, he unlaced her wet hiking boots, tugged them and her soggy socks off, then unsnapped his pack and pulled out a warm sweatshirt, which he used as a towel to dry her hair.

  “You’d better get those jeans off, too, and put your dry ones on. When you ran into the pool, you soaked yourself to the knees.” Tactfully, he busied himself rummaging through her pack to find her dry jeans and then handed them to her without looking. He continued to delve into her supplies, to put the dried fruit and candy she’d brought—plus his own trail mix—onto the ledge beside Jason’s cookies and beans. When he turned again, she was tugging her sweater down over the waist of her jeans, and her feet were already encased in thick, dry socks. She reached for her spare shoes—high-top runners.

  “Here,” he said moments later, having emptied his own pack and taken inventory of what they had. “Drink this.” It was more of the hot, sweet coffee laced with brandy. “No, all of it,” he said when she handed the cup back to him after having had only a couple of sips. “I’ll have mine in a few minutes.”

  Gratefully, she sipped, and slowly her tremors of fear began to abate. The feeling of tightness remained in her chest, but with concentration she could control the panic that kept rising up. All she had to do was remind herself that they could and would get out. Just as soon as they were able, they were going to start digging. Even with their bare hands, it couldn’t take more than a couple of hours to remove the rocks that had fallen into the short passage.

  But Max was right. They needed rest, and they needed a plan. There was no point in tearing into that pile of rubble and bringing down even more, as she had done. Besides, maybe the other collapsed passage, the one behind her, would be the better bet. They hadn’t even examined it yet.

  Handing him back the empty cup, she watched him fill it and then sit back, his expression thoughtful. Picking up her flashlight, she shone it toward where the loose rocks lay at the back of the cave, brushed a few pebbles and some dust off the top of the sleeping bag, and glanced over her shoulder at Max. “This looks like smaller stuff, don’t you think? Maybe we should start digging here.”

  He shook his head. “We don’t know where that goes, or even if there is a passage there at all. At least with the other one, we’re certain it leads outside.

  That was true. She went back to the other end of the sleeping bag.

  “Jeanie, come here.” he said. “Bring the light.”

>   She sat beside him on his folded jacket and felt him wrap his arm around her shoulder. “Honey, I know you’re not going to like it, but we’ll have to turn off the light. We need to conserve the batteries for when we’re digging. When we’re not, I’m afraid we won’t be able to use it.” He took it from her hand, tightened his grip on her, and plunged them into darkness.

  “Please,” she whispered in a choked voice. “Please, turn it on!”

  “It’s all right,” said Max. “I’m right here. I’m holding you. You are safe. Put your hand on my chest. Can you feel me breathing? Breathe with me. Slow and steady. You can do it, sweetheart. Just let yourself rise up over the fear. You’re in a helicopter. The fear is on the ground. You’re lifting high, high above it. It’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and now we’re moving away from it, leaving it behind. We’ll never be going back to that place, so it will never be able to get you again.” Slowly, as his voice went on and on, the tension began to seep out of her. For many long minutes he talked, his voice ever calm and quiet, and finally she was able to breathe easily. She pulled slightly away from him.

  “I guess it’s … a good thing I’m not afraid of heights too,” she said, “since it took a helicopter to fly me up and away from my fear.” Her laughter held more than just a hint of tears, but she swallowed them back. They were in this mess because she had led the way into the cave, it was up to her to be a help to Max, not a hindrance. She would control herself. She would learn to conquer her fear.

  Max felt his own throat tighten as he gave her a little squeeze, a reward for trying to find humor in what must be the most dreadful situation she’d ever found herself in. Her respiration began to grow choppy once more, and he stroked her back with his hand. “That’s right. Keep breathing with me. Slowly, Jeanie. Quietly. Softly. There is lots of air in here. I can feel a draft on my face. Lean forward slightly. There, can you feel it? It’s cool. It should be against your left cheek. When the light was on, you could see that little space above the water where the stream enters. Remember that it’s there. Remember that’s where the air comes from. It doesn’t take a big gap for a lot of air to enter. Concentrate on it. Think about it. Can you feel it?”

  “I can feel it. I know it’s there, Max. I know there’s air even without seeing the place where it comes in. It’s the child in me that doesn’t quite believe that the cracks around the closet door will let in enough air.”

  “The closet?”

  “It was in my grandparents’ basement. He—my grandfather—put me in there if I was bad.”

  “I thought you said your sister raised you.”

  “After our parents died, she did. This was before when I was very little. My parents used to leave us with them sometimes before … before they knew what he did to me. He’s my mother’s father. I look just like her, and he really doesn’t like me much at all. When I was small, he actually hated me, I think. I also think he believed that if he could teach me right from wrong, I’d turn out better than my mother did. So every time we had to stay there, he ‘disciplined’ me by locking me in that closet.”

  “Jeez!” Max’s disgust was clear, even in the total darkness. “Why didn’t your grandmother stop him?”

  She sighed. “What could she do? She was his wife. He got to make the rules. You know that old garbage—love, honor, and obey? This world we live in takes it seriously, even now that most women have stopped making that promise and most men claim to have stopped expecting it. My grandmother used to tell me that if I’d just pay attention to what Grandpa wanted and do what I was told, it wouldn’t happen. But it always did, somehow. I could never figure out what he wanted of me. I know now what he wanted was to punish me for my mother’s having run off and married a man she loved, rather than the one he had chosen for her. You see, my father was a musician, and that wasn’t good enough for him. He thought my father was feckless and, in a way, I guess he was. He and my mother died leaving their children only a house, which Sharon rented out to help defray our living costs while she went to the conservatory on a scholarship.

  “Our grandfather, who could have helped financially and never missed a nickel, wouldn’t. But we didn’t care. We were so grateful that Mom and Dad had made Sharon my guardian in the event that they died, instead of our grandparents.” Her voice trembled. “I’d have run away rather than live in his house with that awful, dark closet, and … do you feel rested enough to start digging now?”

  The abrupt change of subject startled him, although he realized it shouldn’t have. Jeanie might have been talking of her childhood, but the closest thing to the surface of her consciousness right now was getting out of this dark cave. He turned on the light.

  She blinked in the sudden brightness, and the smile on her face was one of pure relief. He wished he didn’t have to conserve the batteries, but he really had no idea how long it was going to take to get them out. Why in hell didn’t I get one of those hand-cranked emergency flashlights? Sheer negligence, is why. The irresponsible belief I’d never need one.

  “Here,” he said, handing her the flashlight. “Find a place where this will shine on the rock fall and then get yourself in position to take the junk I pass back to you.” Carefully, slowly, he lifted out the boulder that had come close to crushing her shoulder when she had first begun to dig. A small clatter of pebbles came from the walls by his head. One by one, he removed other rocks, some large, some small, and either passed or rolled them back for her where she disposed of them in a small depression in the wall. An hour passed, and yet another; the small depression was filled, and she had begun to stack rocks and rubble wherever it looked as if it wouldn’t be in their way.

  Max soon suffered from bloody torn fingers and nails. Jeanie’s knees ached from kneeling and crawling. Her sides burned from lifting and shoving rocks. But in her leather ski gloves, her hands were more protected that his. She wished the gloves would fit him, but his hands were much too large. She could almost feel his pain each time he lifted another piece of rock and though they had worked without ceasing for what seemed like days, they were no closer to clearing a passage than when they had begun. What had happened, she wondered, to her original estimate of two hours to freedom?

  They stopped finally at Max’s insistence. She washed his bleeding hands and both their filthy faces in the cold water of the stream, used Max’s knife to open Jason’s can of beans, and fed both of them. They each had one cookie after the meal.

  “Put my other socks on your hands,” Jeanie suggested, looking at Max’s tattered and bleeding fingers. He was doing the most of the work, taking the brunt of the punishment. The more protection he could get, the easier it would be on him. “It can’t hurt, and it might help.” But within twenty minutes of their starting again, her socks were as full of gashes as his skin and simply got in the way.

  “Max … what time is it?” Jeanie slumped back in exhaustion, staring at his back in the now dimming light. She knew many more hours had passed and that her flashlight was almost as spent as they were.

  Wearily, he scrunched himself around and held his watch before the flashlight. He blinked, looked again, and said, “Two twenty-eight.”

  “In the morning?”

  “I think it must be.”

  “Then we stop for the night,” she said with as much decisiveness as her weariness permitted. “And Max, we may be digging for nothing, you know. When we don’t show up, they’re going to be looking for us. And when they find that tape you put on the cedar tree, with no trail leading away from it, they’ll do what we did and look under the branches. They’ll follow the rest of the trail, see the rock fall, and be digging from the other side. But that won’t happen till daylight.”

  “You’re right,” he said, crawling to the stream and cleaning himself up as best he could. Glancing sideways at Jeanie, he wondered if he should tell her that the chances of anyone’s finding the rock fall were remote. No, he decided, opening up the sleeping bag to its full width.

  “Lie
down, Jeanie.” When she had done so, he pulled his blanket over them.

  There may never be a need for her to know that I didn’t have a tape to tie to that cedar bough.

  In the inky blackness of the cavern, he felt her shivers of fear, her raspy, panicky breaths. He stroked her back with long, rhythmic massages, whispering to her all the comforting words he could find in his vocabulary. Presently, she slept, and Max relaxed, allowing sleep to overcome him. The next day was going to be just as hard.

  “This isn’t going to be the piece of cake we thought it was, is it?” Jeanie asked sometime during the next day. They had both been wide awake after only five hours sleep and were on their third rest-and-cookie break. The first time Max had called it that she had giggled so much, he’d feared he might have to actually smack her to snap her out of hysteria, but she’d sobered when he clamped her arms in his large, dirty hands.

  “You sounded—like—like a kindergarten teacher,” she chortled. After allowing her a couple more sobbing laughs, he drew her against his chest, stroking her filthy, tangled hair back from her face.

  Her flashlight had lost its last bit of power a few minutes before. They sat sipping water, he from the thermos cup, she from her water bottle, and munching their cookies in the dark. “I wonder if they’ve found our cedar tree yet? Would we be able to hear them digging if they were out there?” she asked.

  “I doubt it,” he said, because he doubted anyone was out there digging.

  “I bet they’ve found Jason by now, though.” she said, and he murmured agreement because he knew she needed to believe that. “Poor Sharon. This is a rotten thing to do to her, isn’t it? She’s relied on me so much these past few years, and now I’ve gone and pulled a lousy, stupid stunt like this.” He rocked her slightly, careful not to slop her water. They had no more dry clothing to change into.

  “Max?”

  “I’m right here,” he said.

  “Mmm-hmm. I know. And I’m glad. But I’ve been wondering why you dove into the fissure after me when it started to collapse. I know you could have gotten out. You could have led them to me. You didn’t have to put yourself in this position along with me.”