“Jesus,” he said softly when she pulled onto the road again, with a hairsbreadth between the Maverick and a roaring semi. When they were in the mainstream of traffic, he looked from one of them to the other. “Are you two sisters?” he asked. “I think I see a family resemblance. Something about the eyes.”
Linda began to suspect that he was only a con man. She and Robin might be considered physical opposites, if anything. She said, “Related by marriage,” and left it at that.
“You married?” he asked Robin, a question guaranteed to win her disdain. Ho-ho, Linda thought, but Robin only smiled again and shook her head.
“Ah,” Wolfie said. “Me, neither,” as if they shared a conspiracy of wisdom.
Me, neither, Linda wanted to shout. “Whose wedding?” she asked, pretending it wasn’t unusual for guests to hitchhike to one.
“A friend’s,” Wolfie answered, in a way that closed the subject. Then he turned his attention to the landscape. He observed it hungrily and began to point things out to Robin. She usually ignored Linda’s shared observations, but she listened carefully to his, and even asked questions. What did they call those clouds, and those trees? What caused the pools of “water” on the highway that disappeared as you approached them? He named the white, blooming clouds cumulus, and those small fringed trees they saw everywhere ailanthus, or trees of heaven. They just come up, he told them, even in the sidewalk cracks of big cities. Light waves bouncing off the hot air near the pavement give the illusion of water from a distance. The angle changes as you approach and the mirage vanishes.
Linda listened, too, and when she tailgated the car in front of them and had to stop short, Wolfie’s foot braced against an imaginary brake, and he apologized for taking her mind off the road. Later, when he asked where they were heading, she wanted to tell him everything, and ask what he thought she should do, and what states had legalized abortion, and if she might die of one simply because no one would be waiting for her not to.
“Our next real destination is Valeria, Iowa,” she said, “where Robin’s grandfather and aunt live,” and she knew she sounded as carefree as one of the Bobbsey Twins on the way to Grandpa’s farm. After that, she told him, she would continue on alone to California, to Los Angeles maybe, or San Francisco, she wasn’t sure. He asked what route she planned to take from Iowa, and she showed him the map with its prescribed yellow line. “That’s the fastest, I guess,” he said. “But the southern route’s prettier, I think, if you’re not in a big hurry to get there.” She asked if he would write it down, and he drew a new penciled line across the country.
Linda said that she and Robin were going to look for a place to stay overnight pretty soon. They were close to some caverns she’d promised they would visit.
“Wherever you want to let me out will be fine,” Wolfie said. “I’ll probably be able to pick up another ride today, from there. So far I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve made it down from Montreal in five days. I’m moving, but there’s still time to look around, to see everything.”
“What were you doing up there?” Linda asked.
“Staying out of Vietnam, in the first place. Then, longing for America for a while.”
It was the war she had grown up with. When did it finally end? Five, six years ago? The draft was over even before that.
Slatesville had enjoyed a modest boom of government contracts at the asbestos mills during the war. Much too late, though, for her father to share in the rewards of overtime. She felt that he would have loved the escalation of the war. He’d always hated and feared Communists, unions, pacifists. Like Mr. Piner, he would have raged about Johnson, and then Nixon, who forfeited a hero’s potential by not dropping the big one and bringing our boys home. Our boys included anyone not afraid of dying in distant places for uncertain causes. If Linda had been a man of draft age when her father was still alive, she believed she would have gone off without protest to whatever war they happened to be waging, in a last-ditch effort to please him. And she would have been killed, probably, because nothing less would really have done it.
Now she felt a lovely satisfaction in riding next to this beautiful and peaceful man whom her father would have excluded forever from that doomed fraternity of “our boys.”
“Do you like Canada?” she asked.
“That first winter was murder,” he said, “after New Mexico. I thought I was never going to get warm, and I was unemployed besides. I did odd jobs, mostly, while I slowly turned blue. Then I found work with a silversmith in Montreal. That’s what I did before, in Santa Fe.” He pulled a chain from the neck of his T-shirt and Linda saw a silver bird in flight across his hand.
“Then I did begin to like Canada, except for the cold. I never really got used to it—guess I’m a desert boy by nature. Anyway, when Jerry sort of pardoned us, I decided to stay. Most of the guys I knew did. Hell, we weren’t going to come home and get our hands slapped. Anyway, I was happy with my job by then, with my woman, with my life.”
Linda’s heart stumbled. But what did she think? Of course he’d have a woman. Everybody had somebody. Glancing to either side as she drove, she saw other cars with couples in front and goggle-eyed children in back. Their bumpers were plastered with proof of family vacations. They had gone together to Wigwam Village, Santa’s Toyland, and the Parrot Jungle. The Maverick wobbled halfway over the broken line and then back again.
“Hey,” Wolfie said. “Are you tired? Here I am, telling you my life story. I can drive for a while if you want me to. I’m licensed, ma’am, reliable, sober.”
Oh, she wanted him to, all right. She wanted to see his hands on the wheel, for one thing, and to lay her head in his lap and dive into a deep dreamless sleep. “No, I’m fine,” she said. “Really.” She asked him how he’d gotten into the country. Wasn’t he still kind of “wanted”?
He laughed and said it wasn’t hard. The border check was pretty casual these days and he had a friend’s ID. Staying in the U.S. might be more complicated.
“Are you going to stay?” Robin asked, Linda’s unspoken question.
“I’ll see,” Wolfie answered. “I’ll see how things work out.”
While the deflated tire was being repaired, they all went into the Howard Johnson’s next door. There was a short wait for tables, and Muzak was playing an orchestrated version of “Love Me Tender,” heavy on the strings. Without a word, Wolfie put his arm around Linda’s waist and danced her gently around the hostess and the candy counter and back to their place on line, before she could resist. Linda felt exhilarated and oddly unembarrassed, as if ballroom dancing at Howard Johnson’s was a usual occurrence. The hostess, who was still smiling, held up three fingers and they were seated. Other diners sitting near them smiled, too. He was obviously the sort of man who got away with things.
When they went back to the gas station, Linda was thinking of saying that they would skip the caverns this trip, and continue driving at least until it was dark. If he wanted to go along, that would be fine with her. She was going in that direction, anyway.
While she paid for the tire, he picked up a ride in a VW van full of teenagers who were heading west nonstop. Linda tried to set her face so that she would not appear abandoned, or even concerned. “Oh, good,” she said. “We were going to have to let you out soon, anyway.” She pulled the car into a line of cars waiting for gas, and Wolfie leaned his head into the window to say goodbye. She could see the multicolored tangle of hairs that made up his beard, and the starry irises of his eyes. She suffered the kind of vertigo she’d have when she sat too close to the screen at the movies. Con man, she told herself. But what if he kissed her?
He didn’t, though. He said, “Bonne chance, Linda,” and he touched his hand to hers, sealing it eternally to the steering wheel.
Robin was using the rest room. When she came out, the van was raising dust in the distance. “Wolfie said to say goodbye,” Linda told her.
Robin stared down the road for a long time, shading her eyes with one hand
, and she didn’t answer. When they were ready to leave again, she climbed into the front seat next to Linda, for the first time since they’d left New Jersey.
11 They went down to the caverns in an elevator that moved so slowly it seemed reluctant to make the journey. It was crowded and nobody spoke for at least a hundred feet of their descent. Then someone farted, the first manifestation of a developing group anxiety, and everyone laughed and blamed the small children, who denied it in a round of protests. “It wasn’t me! It musta been Kenny.” “Not me, dumbbell. Judy did it. She does it all the time.” “I did not. It musta been Kenny.”
At last they were at the bottom. Of course it was dark. What did she expect? It was underground, wasn’t it? But the unforgiving quality of the darkness surprised her, and a dampness that seemed to permeate her clothing, her flesh, to enter her very bones, made Linda shudder. She looked at Robin, who didn’t seem overjoyed to be there, either.
The group, forced into physical closeness in the elevator, still huddled, behind the guide now, whose voice was so automatically cheerful she might easily have been doing sums in her head at the same time. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our speleological tour. Anyone who can spell ‘speleological’ will win a free pass to our next scheduled tour in one hour. Okay. It is believed that Indians penetrated further into Hidden River Caverns than into any other Ohio caves. Evidence of ceremonial rites has been found in its deepest recesses: arrowheads, remnants of torches, and the wrappers from Big Macs.”
The laughter ricocheted. A tall, gray-haired woman near Linda said, “What in heaven’s name would we do if that elevator broke down?” Her breath was sour with fear.
“Oh, they have to have others,” Linda said. “Don’t they?”
“Okay. The stalagmites and stalactites in Hidden River Caverns are noted for their unusual pink coloration due to the large percentage of quartz in their formation. Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll step through here and watch your heads, please.”
The passage they walked through was so narrow they had to go single-file. Robin was in front of Linda, the tall woman behind. “I can never remember,” the woman whispered loudly, “which ones go up and which ones come down, can you?”
A man behind her said, “It’s easy. There’s a little trick I learned in school. Stalactites are on top. Get it? Tites and top. They both start with ‘t.’ ”
His wife didn’t agree. “We were told to remember the mighty mites,” she said.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“It means that if you’re mighty, you’re upright, and you’ve got both feet on the ground.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” he told her.
“See?” the tall woman said. “I’ve forgotten it already.”
“Okay. It is believed that Hidden River Caverns were also used by the Indians as an escape route during the frontier days,” the guide said. “The entire length of the passage is ten miles and is on three levels.”
Linda wished they’d worn heavier sweaters. It was really chilly. She also wished they had not come here in the first place, and she wondered how long the tour was, and if there was any possible way to leave before it was over. What would happen if a man had a heart attack, or a woman went into labor? Could a cave catch on fire?
“How are you doing?” she asked Robin.
“All right,” Robin said.
“Me, too.”
The book she’d bought was called Alice in Underland: A Guide to Our Nation’s Caves. The photographs showed relaxed and happy tourists measuring themselves against giant rock formations, and clowning in front of one shaped like a bear.
Judy and Kenny tested their lung power by screaming in the passageway, and the woman behind Linda said, “People should not bring small children who are too young to appreciate places like this.”
“Everybody still with me? We didn’t lose anybody? Okay. I’m going to deactivate the lights for a moment to show you the absolute darkness in the caverns. Lovers, beware, I’m going to turn them on again in fifteen seconds!”
It had to be much longer than that, although time isn’t really measurable in certain circumstances. Linda knew that this was what it was like to have consciousness after death, to feel the earth all around you, and the darkness, with only a fading memory of light, like an old longing. This is what it was like to be buried for dead and to come alive again later, too late. She had a moment’s gratitude for having had Wright cremated, and thought, not without irony, about the ashes being above-ground in the actual world, and Robin and herself being here beneath it.
Somebody made loud kissing noises, evoking weak laughter. “Oh, God,” someone else said, the voice seeming to seep through the walls. “Oh, God.”
The lights came on again and they walked into a huge vaulted room. There was the sound of moving water close by.
“Okay,” the guide said. “This is the main ceremonial auditorium, and the noise you hear is not because someone left the tap on in the ladies’ room.”
Was there really a ladies’ room? Were there stalactites hanging over the toilets? Stalagmites?
“It is the Hidden River Caverns River, a body of water that is twenty feet at its widest place and less than six feet at its narrowest, and is a half mile long. If you will all step this way, we’ll be going on a little boat ride.”
“Hurray!” one of the children yelled, and Linda remembered a classmate bragging about just such a boat ride years ago. Had he actually been terrified then? Would he go down here again as a grown man?
They went in two by two, she and Robin partners, and it was a little like the Tunnel of Love in the Slatesville amusement park, except you moved out into sunlight again at the end of that ride. This one only led you to the Crystal Altar, where they all disembarked. Linda noticed a few flash cubes scattered on the floor.
The guide explained that Marryin’ Sam, a local preacher, performed wedding ceremonies on this spot, out of the regular tourist season. She showed them a heart-shaped rock on which the bride and groom stood, and said that there had been 632 such marriages begun here, so far. Some of the sentimental couples even came back for anniversaries.
Linda and Wright had been married in the back room of a Chinese restaurant in Jersey City. Iola and Simonetti were there, along with a few other guests. Simonetti asked the waiter for more “flied lice” about forty times. Robin ordered spaghetti from the American menu. When they were ready to leave, Iola asked the manager for some rice to throw at the newlyweds, and was given steamed rice in one of those little cardboard takeout containers.
In the trunk of the Maverick, Linda had a picture of her parents taken on their wedding day twenty-seven years before. Her father was frowning and her mother looked solemn, yet hopeful. She continued to wear white for the rest of her life.
It was hot outside. The group dispersed as if they couldn’t wait to get away from one another. Children ran from parents, who didn’t call them back. Couples separated and moved around alone near the souvenir stand and the restaurant. Linda and Robin looked at the postcards, and the little paperweights with replicas of the caverns inside them, and the added puzzling element of snowflakes when you shook them. Everything was overpriced and ugly, but Linda asked Robin if she’d like something as a memento of the day. Robin shook her head and then walked behind Linda back to the motel. They passed the Maverick and saw that a sticker had been affixed to the rear bumper. We Visited Hidden River Caverns. Home of the Crystal Altar.
This was one of the most expensive rooms they’d had so far, because it was so close to the caverns, and a winery, and something called Donnie’s Adventureland. They were told they were lucky to get the last room in the place, even if it did have only one double bed, and the lights from Adventureland playing all over the walls when the drapes were open.
After dinner in the Hidden River Café, which was just another diner, despite the door shaped like the opening to a grotto, they went back to their room a
gain. The air conditioner droned and it seemed as cold in there as it had been underground. Linda was sleepy, and for once she claimed the bathroom first. She turned the shower on and began to pull off her shirt when she remembered a teen magazine she’d bought that morning as a little surprise for Robin, and had left in the car.
Robin was tearing off her clothes as if they were on fire. Linda noticed that the nightstand drawer was open and that the telephone book was on the floor. “Robin,” she said. “I forgot to tell you—”
Robin whirled away from her, pulling the just discarded T-shirt against her chest.
“My God,” Linda said. “What’s that thing on your back?”
“It’s nothing. Leave me alone,” Robin said.
“But it’s blue! Let me look at it, Robin, please!”
Robin evaded Linda’s reaching arm and ran around the bed yelling, “Leave me alone, leave me alone!”
“I have to see that,” Linda said, chasing her. “I’m responsible for you, damn it!”
Robin ducked and dodged and went the other way. “Don’t be. Don’t be, you asshole!”
Linda stood still. She could hear the shower running behind her. “What did you say? What did you call me?”
They were on opposite sides of the bed, panting.
“I didn’t call you anything,” Robin said, her voice disappearing on the last syllable.
“You did,” Linda insisted. “You called me an asshole. That’s a terrible word to call somebody. I haven’t done anything to you, Robin. Somebody else might have left you flat, not cared what happened to you.”
The girl’s eyes were feverish, and her voice had come back, hoarse and dry. “I don’t care,” she said.
“I mean you don’t even talk to me, and I’m dragging you all the way across the country. We were only married six measly weeks. That’s hardly anything. We were practically strangers. And do you know what I paid for that lamp you gave away without a second thought, miss? Twelve ninety-eight! I shopped for two days to get the right thing. Any other teenager in America would have been thrilled to death to have it. What’s the matter with you?”
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