"I don't need no ring," Buddy said. He kept his eyes wide open in the light.
But Dad held him high with one arm and kept the light on him, and began to turn, slowly, till Buddy couldn't tell anymore where the walls were, where the sound of the water came from, which direction was the way out. And Dad's rasped whisper was everywhere—not a whisper even, but a breathing that said words and got into Buddy's head till it took up all the room and he couldn't hear anything else.
They were turning, smooth, like a planet and a moon. It felt to Buddy like they were falling sideways, falling and falling.
"You need it," Dad said. "You want to do them favors. You got me on the porch those times, and you had me behind the house, that time you run and got me on my knees. You didn't want to do it, you think I woulda known to make you?" He shook Buddy hard, one time. "You think I woulda known?"
Everything was light. Dad's head and the cave were light, and the arm that held Buddy pulled him closer to the white eye of the light. The eye was all heat and fire, burning, and Dad's voice said, "You didn't want to do it? You a girl, ain't you?" The fire wavered, and then it roared, "Answer me!"
"No!" Buddy screamed. "You did it! You wanted to! I'm no girl, I'm a boy, I always been a boy!"
And the light burst apart, falling back in fiery shards. An onslaught of rushing air exploded from behind the flared core. The bats seemed to flow through by the hundreds within that black pulse, scattered and streaming, rippling from high up, far back. In the air of their wings Buddy heard them all around, an infinite rapid crackling like snapped flags, pulsing forward like a grid in buoyant motion. The grid spliced around and beyond him and closed past him in a surge, pouring through.
What held him bobbed and weaved and fell down, and Buddy was talking in the dark. "They ain't going to hit you," he said. "They can feel where you are."
The light had dropped and flared round, a vertical, empty beam drawn upwards, and Buddy saw the bats pass through its edges like a tremor. They poured forth, separate and connected, a flickering smoke. Their sharp little faces seemed to dip and glint in the high rattle of their passage. They were like fist-sized foxes, with their pointed ears and lifted lips, tasting the air over Turtle Hole, all of Camp Shelter their dense, moon-fed food. Dispersed, glimpsed far up over trees, they contracted like skeletal birds and fluttered, blurred and ashen. But here they were animals. Looking and surging for the hole at the front of the cave.
"It's dark now," Buddy said. "We got to go out."
He dove for the light but Dad grabbed it first. Dad crouched down and held it tight between his knees, all folded over it like a long-limbed bug lit up from beneath.
"No," Dad said, "we ain't going anywhere."
The light only shone through from underneath him, in lines.
"We got to go now," Buddy said. "They all at the bonfire. I can get them rings now."
"No," Dad said, "I think we stay here now." He hunched farther down, rasping each word. "You gonna do me a favor and then we going to stay here. We ain't going to go out."
"You afraid of them bats?" Buddy said. "Bats ain't going to hurt you. It's this dark you got to get out of."
"Ain't dark," Dad said. "I got the light. You ain't got it."
"I can get them rings," Buddy said, "for your stake. You don't need no car, you got a stake that can get you a far ways. All the way to Florida, to that white sand—"
Dad kept his hands on his face and he was talking and murmuring words. "You lie, you lie," he seemed to say.
"I ain't lying," Buddy said, "I can get them—"
Dad talked on and Buddy realized he was saying his foreign words. Dad was all turned around. He'd believe a he and he'd turn off the light. Buddy thought he might be able to see again if the light was out.
"Turn the light off, then," Buddy said. "Them bats will fly toward that light. You keep that light on, them bats will head for you. They looking for the light, get outside to the water, all them skeeters over the water—"
The light went off.
Buddy thought about the elliptical hole of the cave entrance, the lopsided hole in the rocks. He saw it, the way it looked from the outside, with sunlight playing across the stone and scrub pine grown up around it. Out there the air was so big it went clear up to the sky, and Turtle Hole lay still and blue in a dark so soft it was only shadows. The look of it was like a picture in the utter blackness of the cave, a black fierce and close as the dense hide of an animal. Buddy could still hear bats pass above them, swooping disconnected now in isolated, drooping glides. All in one direction. He turned and walked two steps, three more. He wanted to put his hands out in front of him and feel his way, but he made his hands stay down and looked with his eyes. The wall with the glimmering writing should be to his right. He swept his gaze across again and again but he saw nothing. Fly up, dust, sift down like gold—but it was like Dad's flat palms were clapped tight against his eyes. The gold had clung to Dad, the shadow lifting in a pool around his form, pulling at him. The cave wanted to keep Dad, Buddy thought. Dad was supposed to stay in the cave. He could only get out if he went away from Dad.
"Boy," Dad called out. "You get back here."
Buddy heard the bats flying around him, silent far up, and closer, rattling gently just above his head. Couldn't hear their eerie, ringing sounds but he could feel the shapes of their calls and screams expanding in curves and bells all through the dark. If only he could find the entrance before the cave emptied, Dad would be too scared to turn the light on, Dad wouldn't find him. He looked back to see if Dad had moved and he could see a hunched body behind him, a shadowy hump, yes, dimly glowing. Smoky with the gold dust.
"You!" Dad yelled. "Where you going." He stayed put and craned his head like a turtle might, coming up from water.
Buddy turned his eyes back sharply and thought he saw something move in front of him. Something small, no bigger than a cat. He stood still to look and the form vanished. He tried moving forward, balanced, so still, on the balls of his feet, and the form coalesced again, this time far to his left. There was a sparkle, like a tingle in the dark, or a shudder, and Buddy saw a face in the creature, a textured face drawn down in folds. The mouth moved like a cat's mouth, in a long, luxuriant yawn, and one of the stumpy arms held up a shape, opaque and golden. It held the shape up like a lamp, but it wasn't a lamp, only a gold glow. The creature stood on two legs and turned away to walk, and Buddy followed a faint outline in the dark, trying to get closer. He thought it wore clothes, and its head was an odd shape. It came perhaps to Buddy's knees, were he to get close enough to stand near, and it moved with a trundling motion, like a two-year-old or a midget, but it could surge forward. Or seem to disappear and reappear to the side, or farther ahead. Buddy realized the cave turned to the left, and he wondered if the creature was leading him out or deeper in. He stopped walking and the creature paused and turned. The face, twenty feet beyond Buddy, was an old man's face, yet strangely animal. It wore a hat, conical, like a soft clown's hat, and a bulky jerkin. Suddenly Buddy remembered: green jacket, red cap. Mam's rhyme. Fear of little men. But Buddy wasn't afraid. The creature shimmered and beckoned him, jangling a silent urgency, and Buddy started forward again. The rock beneath his feet slanted upwards and he could feel space narrowing, as though they moved through a tunnel and the tunnel grew smaller as they progressed. They seemed to be moving quickly, without effort, and there was a shine to the rock sides of the world. Buddy blinked his eyes. Dad could never follow him here. It was so easy to walk now. Ahead was a circular formation, a wreath as big as a door, and the rock v/as dark gold, lustrous; the stones felt warm when Buddy came up on them and touched them. The creature was gone or escaped, Buddy thought, for he peered through the circular rocks and saw the slanted hole to the outside of the cave. He stared, trying to make sense. There was a blue space beyond the hole, and that was evening, and evening had so much blue that it was not dark at all. Buddy understood: he was looking at the hole from the wrong angle. He had come another way, from t
he side. Dad had walked straight in, but the cave was full of ways to move, and Buddy went forward and climbed through, raking his arms to clamber down and through the shelf-like hole.
He got outside and everything smelled of plants and dirt in the dizzy blue, and the blue rolled over darker in the air that led to the sky. The ground Buddy stood on was springy with moss, so soft he staggered and sat. He sat down and pressed both hands flat; he looked, to watch himself, and he saw Dad's broad hard shoe beside his hand.
Dad's shoe, like a wall no one could get over.
"Well, what the hell," said Dad's voice. "Beginning to think you wasn't coming out."
"I shined the light all around," Dad's voice said.
"You hadn't heard me yelling, why, you'd been in that cave till you laid down and quit," his voice said.
"Reckon you got me to thank," said Dad's voice. He reached with both long arms and lifted Buddy to his feet. "Get to walkin. We got a job to do."
Buddy felt Dad's hand on his neck, pushing him along the narrow trail behind the diving rock. Buddy knew there was no job. None of it mattered; Dad wouldn't leave. Dad would never leave, and if he did leave, he would always come back. Buddy stumbled. The truth stretched round him vast and circular as a dead world. Dad steered him past the side of the boulder, onto the sandy, pounded ground that circled Turtle Hole. The water spread out still and satiny, flat like a blue egg. Buddy heard sounds, and then he saw the girls. One of them stood still in the water. She turned, and he saw Lenny's face. Startled, backing away. But Dad was in the water too.
PARSON: THE CLOCK AND THE GATE
The goats have fled into the trees and stand waiting at the border of the woods, their soft muzzles visible through the leaves. They hold still like threatened deer. If Parson tries to approach, their images waver, begin to fade. So he stands quietly. From here the seven markers of stones near the diving rock are directly opposite. Parson sees them across the darkening water and feels he is far away, too far from the stones, and he begins to sweat. Steps barefoot into an edge of water and out again, back upground to a border of neutral space halfway between the water and the woods. To calm himself he thinks about the stones, how they felt in his hands. He looks back into the trees and the goats nod their long heads, peering sideways. He knows the stones were big enough, each a little larger than his hand, heavy and flat-bottomed, balanced. Even from here they look placed, deliberate. A low boundary, an entrance, a remnant of a gate.
He squats, then kneels, breathing. He sees light begin to move, first where the trees begin, then along the shore and among the stones. The light is strong and weak, melding, separating. Tracers of movement. Among the stones. Then he sees the girls' bodies across the expanse of water, moving. The older girls, Lenny and the other one. And two younger ones. Glimmering. A convocation. He hears them laughing, calling one to another, but the words are blurred.
He sees Lenny walk into the water, wade in to her waist.
The others separate, calling to one another. Among the stones.
Lenny is swimming farther out.
Behind them the diving rock turns. Shifts in space. Parson sees it turn like a moving wall, glow in the dusk that is layered, furred with shadow.
He sees the boy walk round from behind the turning rock. And Carmody, close enough to grab him, not needing to, attached to him like a dark hole, shining and empty.
As though she feels someone approach, Lenny hesitates in the water. She turns, executes a smooth circular glide, begins swimming back to shore. Parson hears a gong struck, a hollow, resounding break. And Carmody leaves go the boy, walks through stones, is in the water. He swims like a powerful horse; Parson knows how Carmody swims.
Do it, you fuckin loon. You want to do it.
The water is blue beads, like a long cord Parson swallows. A cord he pulls into himself. He feels every stroke, swimming just beneath the surface as though to break the skin of the water would slow his progress. Lethal, ain't you, loon. You can pray over me. And it is like prayer, this clocked glide in heavy space timed to his heart's thud. But he surfaces and sees Carmody reach her, begin to drag her back to shallow water. He erupts in fire like a hunger.
ALMA: CONCERNING THE SOUL
They walk hand in hand where the trail is wide enough. Alma feels Delia's shoulder near her own and they lace fingers or grip each other hard as the path rises and falls, swells and drops, winds around rocks, and the rocks themselves are more than the hard slabs they seem by day, more than a kind of dead furniture thrown up suddenly in the woods. In dusk the lichen dappling their pumiced surfaces light up in scaly lines. The leafy canopies of the trees droop down, as though darkness creeps through them in lengthening shadows. Far off, the campfire flares orange and jagged and Camp Shelter is singing: Rocka my soul in the bosom of Abraham. The song spins out in rounds and Alma hears the sound as echoes trapped somehow behind her.
"It doesn't sound like 'rocking my soul,'" Alma says. "It sounds like 'rock of my soul,' like, you know, a soul is a rock inside a bosom."
"A man's bosom." Delia shrugs. "And who's Abraham? If you know, don't tell me."
"I don't remember," Alma says. "One of the Bible fathers, I don't know. But I know we don't have a flashlight."
"So what? We won't be out all night. Anyway, I could walk this trail blindfolded. Couldn't you?" Delia lets go of Alma and moves ahead, singing under her breath, "Oh, rock of my soul."
There was that old story about the Pied Piper, Alma thinks, where all the children in the town disappear into a rock by the sea. All except the lame boy. His soul is too pure, or not pure enough, and he can't keep up. Can't be taken in, like treasure, which was always hidden in rocks. Like the treasure in one of Nickel Campbell's books, Arabian Nights, buried in a cave inside a rock, and the rock had a door. Then there was the rock Jesus lay within until the third day, and the door of the rock was rolled away. And Lenny had made a game once where the girls collected a treasure of rocks and sank them in the stream, far down in the field behind the house. The rocks fell through beige water, slowly and deeply, and mud furled up like smoke around them when they hit bottom. But Nickel Campbell had floated, floated away, out of his car into river water, and Alma imagines her mother's soul, stuck like a shard of rock in the center of his chest. Wet that day, in the muddy river, buried now. Audrey's soul really would be hard and dense, buried or hidden like a nugget or a seed, like a jewel with her voice held tight inside. Or the voice had found a way into Alma's head, with all its words intact. I don't know why I was brave enough to be so foolish, phoning him at work that first time. Maybe I was just desperate, not willing to go along nursing some little hope. I told him it was Audrey Swenson, please not to say anything, that I knew he went to Winfield to do banking for Consol every Saturday, I wanted to meet him there, this week, at noon at the bus station, I wanted to talk to him, more than anything in the world, please if he would just not ask questions and agree ... What question would he have asked? Sometimes, driving to Winfield, Audrey and Alma had played Twenty Questions; Alma paid close attention to every clue, and she was better than her distracted mother at guessing answers. Animal, vegetable, mineral. Bigger than a bread box.
"I bet we're going skinny-dipping," Delia says. She turns to face Alma, a band of sunburn across her nose and cheeks. She blinks and her eyelids look pale. "Cap will have cigarettes, of course," she says. "Alma, do you ever smoke with them?"
"I don't like smoking," Alma says. "I cough. And it smells awful."
"It doesn't. And Cap wears that French perfume. If you stand near her you can smell it, and it mixes up with any other smell. She told me she wears it for camouflage."
They've come to the clearing, where they leave the swinging bridge and the river behind, and move off into the woods toward Turtle Hole, but Alma bends down to tie her shoe and Delia stops on the path beside her.
Alma frowns. "When did Cap tell you that?"
"One day after breakfast," Delia says, nonchalant. "We were talking. What's her
perfume called? She wouldn't tell me, like it's a secret."
"I know."
"Well?" Delia asks.
"Let's play Twenty Questions," Alma says.
"No, it's boring."
"Twenty questions about Cap. The name of Cap's perfume." She peers up at Delia, then reaches out to pull down Delia's socks. "Your socks fell down."
Delia crouches to pull them up, moves to shove Alma off balance. "So tell me your speech. Let's hear it."
"What, now?"
"You wrote it, didn't you? You know it by heart, I know you do. You were only going to read it off paper to keep from looking at them all." Delia's eyes widen and she leans forward, cocks her head sideways and fits her face to Alma's. The scab at the side of her mouth is a hard little shape. This close, her lashes brush Alma's eyelids.
"I don't have to give it now, not ever, and I'm glad." Alma closes her eyes. She does know all the lines of her speech, but their sequence seems to have jarred loose; the order is gone. President Kennedy said not to ask what our country can do for us. The phrase floats clear in Alma's head, detached from any other, and she smells Delia's skin, Delia's hair. She thinks how like themselves they both still seem, and how different they've become in this place. They smell different now, more like earth, less like their mothers' houses.
"You think she'll forget about it?" Delia laughs, moves away. "Mrs. T.? Not likely."
"She might," Alma says. "The schedule would get messed up if everyone from tonight had to talk tomorrow night—"
Delia makes an impatient noise in her throat, grabs Alma's hand. "But tell it to me. Tell me now, the lines you remember. About the secret furnace in the basement of the Russian embassy. How hot it burns. You were going to say that, weren't you? It's Mrs. T.'s favorite story."
"I don't have to, Delia. It doesn't matter anymore."
"It does matter. Tell me!"
Alma sighs, and she hears how still the woods are. She will have to say something, tell Delia. "All right, listen," she says, and she leans close to Delia, whispering each word distinctly. "Blue on blue. Heartache on heartache." She wonders if Delia will hit her, slap her.
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