Reprisal

by Mitchell Smith

  slim?

  Joanna worked all afternoon, rewriting, and didn't think of Frank very often.

  There was no background sound. They'd never had a television over in White River, and there was none in the cottage. There was a radio in the living room, but she wanted no noise or music-particularly no music. Silence was the least disturbing sound. ...

  She ate dinner in her bathrobe, standing at the kitchen counter. She had canned corned-beef hash, a fried egg, toast, and a glass of milk.

  Dinner for one. And with no green vegetables, no yellow vegetables, no care for the health of a middle-aged husband careless of his health. All that had come to nothing. Wasted care. ... Frank could have had all the country sausage and pizza, all the steak and buttered baked potatoes he wanted. Could have smoked his cigars. ...

  Joanna finished, with most of the corned-beef hash left over. ... And had decided to get farther away, for a day or so, from the treacherous sea --the sea, its sailors and fishermen still alive, disinterested in a dead soccer coach, a lover who'd made her laugh so many years ago, first instructed

  --after a strangled Irish young manhood of swift drunken fucking--in the mysteries of her clitoris. Dead husband. Dead man. He was on that side now, and could never come over except in her dreams.

  Joanna went down the kitchen steps, and around the back of the cottage to the garage's side door.

  Her ropes and gear were hanging from pegs along the garage wall. A panoply of the elegant equipment necessary to travel and live beneath the surface of the earth. It was equipment a mountaineer or rock climber would use--but tougher, heavy-duty, made to accept unacceptable conditions of wet stone, crumbling stone, mud, fast water and abrasion.

  These beautiful slender snake-skinned ropes, the gleaming links of aluminum or steel, the climbing and descending tools were, with courage, the keys to a world of darkness beneath the world of light, so she'd been able to live two lives, where most men and women lived only one. ... Like many cavers, she'd been a concealing little child, happy hidden behind sofas or beneath the stairs, exploring the basement for what might be behind shadows, whatever found in darkness. She hadn't been afraid of the dark.

  On vacation after her freshman year at Radcliffe, she'd gone with a young man to New Mexico--a golden boy, Curt Garry, she'd been too careless in loving.

  They'd met at a dance at Dartmouth--both conscious of their cleverness, beauty, youth, and luck. Conscious even--at least she had been--of the picture they made together. A slender and active girl, dark-eyed, her long hair a rich and glossy black--and a tall lean hazel-eyed boy, old-fashioned in his angular good looks, his hair bright as sun-struck straw.

  Too perfect a picture for them to fulfill.

  Joanna had enjoyed the boy, the high-desert sun and sunlight, and had been invited by Curt's uncle down into the Lechuguilla cave, a very special favor.

  Lechuguilla contained the most beautiful series of cave chambers yet found on earth. And in those glittering spaces--snowy, delicate, spun with frosted calcite lace and fantastic in limestone chandeliers, exquisite decorations jeweled by millions of years--Joanna had fallen in love with under-earth. With the earth's secrets, as a little child found comfort and mystery both, beneath its mother's skirts.

  Muddy, exhausted, and badly frightened once-crawling through a narrow squeeze that seemed to contract its stone walls around her, press her breathless--she had found herself at home. ... She found caving, and later in the year lost Curt Garry--who ran from her like a rabbit--and lost forever a certain regard for herself as well.

  But after that, she had caved every chance she got. Below the earth seemed more important than above it, and she enjoyed the company of cavers--odd adventurers all, with that interesting combination of hard common sense and risk-taking seen in mountaineers, rock climbers, and pilots. Like poets, they saw life as a temporary opportunity, to be taken full advantage of.

  --Curt's mother, who'd liked Joanna, had called her seven years later. Still single, an attorney with a Chicago firm, he'd died of lymphoma ... had asked his mother to call, and sent love. ...

  Blue Water ropes, Pigeon Mountain ropes--all wonderfully light, slim, and strong--were hanging high on the garage wall in rich thick color-banded coils.

  Some of it static rope--tough and inelastic for long, long rappels down into darkness ... and then the endless climbs returning, working back up that single thin, sheathed strand of nylon. Stepping up, rope-walking, with two or three cammed ascenders each sliding up the line in turn, then gripping ...

  sliding up, then gripping ... so the caver, attached to them, traveled like a great slow spider back up the hundreds of feet he'd sailed down so lightly.

  Then a different rope for risk climbing, lead climbing for rock climbing to depths beneath the earth. A dynamic line, more fragile, with stretch enough under shock to cushion a sudden fall. Giving ... giving to prevent a smashed pelvis, a broken back, or snapped harness straps and a fall all the way.

  A screamer, cavers called that fall, though Merle Budwing had shouted, and only once, as he went.

  Hanging coils of rope, and below them the parachute-buckled black webbing straps of sit harness and chest harness. Her new harness--and her old set and helmet, brought out just in case she might persuade Frank down a shallow sea cave along the coast. ... The bright red PVC equipment and supply packs hung from pegs to the side, one loaded with web-tape cow's-tails, tape slings, an etrier--that useful thick nylon strap sewn into a four-loop ladder--and batteries, flashlight, lighters, and Cylume sticks for emergency backup light--along with freeze-dried food bars, Super Leatherman multitool, and small hand-pumped water filter.

  Another pack contained the neat machinery for movement up and down the rope.

  Cammed ascenders --yellow Jumars, Gibbses, and Petzl Crolls, with their nylon-webbing attachment straps and bungee cords--and the Simmons chest-harness rollers to run the rope through, hold the climber upright against the line. ... Then the rappelling gear, to control descent by friction. A bobbin, with twin small pulley-wheels to slow the rope as it fed through. And, for longer drops, a rack--a fourteen-inch miniature steel ladder, with movable little aluminum rungs to cramp the rope sliding over and under them as the caver sailed slowly down.

  The smallest pack held a Suunto compass, canteen and folding cups, pocket notebook and pencil, toilet paper, small plastic shitsacks, and a first-aid kit.

  ... Ranked along higher pegs on their nylon-webbing slings, the carabiners jingled softly when Joanna lifted them down. Petzl Spirit 'biners, most of them, elegantly spring-gated links, D's and C's of fine forged aluminum to run rope through, to tie it to, or connect descenders and ascenders to her harness. The carabiners--and, ringing more brightly, three stainless-steel maillon connectors, strong screw-links in two half-rounds and a triangle.

  There was nothing there--no carabiner or length of rope, no nylon-webbing tape in her packs, no cammed ascender, Gibbs or Petzl, no friction descender, bobbin or rack--that had not held Joanna's life safe many times suspended in lamplit darkness within chambers too deep, too huge, ever to be seen entirely.

  Great rooms beneath the earth and sunlight of America, of Mexico, of Jamaica, of Borneo.

  In years of caving, she had learned to rock climb--lead or belay--to deal with stone-fall, packed mud, narrow squeezes, to deal with cave river duck-unders.

  To deal with fear. ... She'd learned to rig, to prusik up the rope, rappel down it--and change, in mid-rope over emptiness, to either. She could, if necessary, do these things --and other rigging, for rescues, much more complicated --while beneath a cave's icy and battering waterfall, or in perfect darkness. She had learned to trust her gear, but back it up--and to dress and set every knot she made. ...

  Joanna opened the Volvo's trunk, laid the heavy rope-coils carefully far back, away from possible damage by spills or anything sharp or snagging, then lifted in the PVC equipment packs, two big rope sacks-to hold the lengths of line suspended beneath her, rappelling--her
sit and chest harnesses, her helmet and its attached lamp--electric, not carbide--a spare helmet lamp and two spare sealed lithium battery packs.

  Her boots--greased Redwing Red Setters-and her old jeans, work shirt, sweater, and blaze-orange ballistic-nylon coveralls were in the cottage hall closet with the sleeping bags. The evening ferry, the last ferry, left at dark.

  Chapter Three

  Charis, masturbating, pretended she was lying beneath Greg Ribideau. Beneath a boy, even pretending, was a good place to think. She supposed women often used beneath as a place to consider things.

  Alone in the room, she lay under her sheet with her jeans and panties off. She lay with her knees up and spread as wide as she could, her socks on. "We do that, first thing," Mr. Langenberg had said to her many years ago. Said it only a few days after Margaret Langenberg had died.

  Charis had had no real sex with Greg Ribideau. The only sex they'd had, and only once, she'd done. He'd just sat on the bed in her room, and she'd unzipped his pants and jerked him off into her other hand. Greg had been in heaven, coming in her hand.

  He'd stayed for a while after that, and Charis had gotten her pint of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie from the common-room refrigerator. They'd had a mysterious ice cream thief in the dorm for a while, even though most of the summer students were graduates, and older, and should have been able to buy their own.--She and Greg had finished the pint of Fudge Brownie, then he'd kissed her and left, supposing they were serious lovers with a future.

  But now he knew better ... and it seemed to Charis he was relieved. She'd only known him the few weeks since she'd registered at White River for the graduate program, and started summer classes. He'd come over to her table at the cafeteria, said "Okay?" and sat down. "I don't know how to begin with you,"

  he'd said. "I'm shy. Andwitha beautiful girl, I'm very shy."

  Charis had kept eating her egg-salad sandwich.

  "--But I've been watching you in The American Novel ... and I finally couldn't help myself."

  He was a nice-looking boy, maybe two years younger than she was. Tall, with pale-brown curly hair already hinting at receding. Soft blue eyes, almost a girl's eyes.

  Charis had finished her sandwich. "What's your name?"

  "Greg. Greg Ribideau."

  "Well, I'm shyer than you are," Charis had said, then stood, picked up her tray, and walked away. She'd tried being with boys ... with men, really. Just four of them in the seven years since Mr. Langenberg died. She hadn't enjoyed it.

  Then, when she'd been thinking of killing herself so as not to be so lonely, she'd gone to bed with a girl, Margaret Gowens--but also for a purpose, for information from the agency. That sex, with the softness and slipperiness and hugging, had just been unbearable.

  Charis lay back, lifted her knees, and was rough with herself down there. She was forceful with herself, but not enough so she bled.

  She used to imagine she was submerged in a tank filled with dark-green water--and was slowly rotting in there, crumbling, with little pieces of her breaking off and sifting away. Spoiling under dark water in a tank made of glass. ... Old glass, with dirt and streaks of green on it, so she could barely see people looking in, and they could barely see her.

  Charis felt something beginning to happen; she was so wet she could smell herself. And she tried to be gentler. It was foolish to be so rough, when it was only her and her.

  ... It had been one afternoon last summer--while she was working at Birch Lodge in the Shawangunks in New York--that she'd realized she was going to kill herself because of loneliness, would have to kill herself unless she went back to basics and started again from the beginning. Unless she did the work, all the research necessary to find out where the beginning was, and then put right what had been so wrong.

  ... And doing that, starting over, was already beginning to help. For example, it had helped with Greg. She felt absolutely comfortable meeting him on the library roof for brown-bag lunches or takeout dinner when he worked late, Tuesdays and Thursdays.--He was a part-time book stacker for the summer, a good on-campus job. They'd meet up there, afternoons or evenings, sometimes with other students working in the library, and sit on the flat, tarred roof in old worn-out deck chairs, looking out over the campus ... the hills.

  She was even interested, now and then, in what Greg had to say. ... So she was definitely getting better, socially.

  People--Rebecca, for example--thought she and Greg Ribideau were close.

  Probably thought they had sex, which they hadn't, not after that once. Even though there was only a two-year difference, Greg was too young for her. He was a really young nineteen, like Rebecca, a baby. In fact, it was Greg and Rebecca who should be together. Rebecca liked him ... did a little girl's restless got-to-pee dance when the three of them met on campus on the way to class. Rebecca, small, sort of cute but not beautiful, was a soft girl. A daddy's girl ... without her daddy, now.

  No more sex, no real sex, with Greg. It would be like being with a springer spaniel. Lots of whining and licking. There wasn't enough to Greg for anything serious. He wouldn't know what to do to her, whether she liked it or not. ...

  Charis turned on her side, and made a pressing fist between her legs. That was better. Something was happening.

  ... But still, she could date Greg sometimes, eat lunch with him and talk about their classes. He was in two of her classes, a regular student at the college, like Rebecca--in summer session to make up credits to save school time later. Greg wasn't stupid.

  They'd talked about their papers, Thursday. He was doing Willa Cather. Charis was doing James Gould Cozzens.

  "A choice out of nowhere," Greg had said. He was eating a cheeseburger, which was what he always had for lunch. "Why Cozzens?" It was hot, the library's tarred roof--the students called it Tar Beach--radiating heat from the summer afternoon.

  "Read Guard of Honor. He's an adult and he writes about men who are adults."

  "Cather writes about adults."

  "She writes about girls and boys. Mainly girls. ..."

  Lying on her side was definitely better. Something was happening. ... One night, Rebecca, across the room, had wakened when Charis was masturbating, had wakened and must have thought she was sick. She'd said, "Charis ...? Charis, are you okay?"

  And Charis had said, "I'm masturbating, Rebecca. I'm fine."

  Rebecca hadn't said anything after that. Probably embarrassed. Just lay there in the dark and listened. At the time, Charis had been using a hard rubber dildo called the Black Bomber, and it was big enough to hurt her. It hit something inside, which she'd felt before, and hurt her.

  Rebecca had said nothing for a few days about that middle-of-the-night thing--then she'd said something to Charis about supposing that doing that, playing with yourself, was healthy. Just another experience, and she supposed Charis knew a lot about sex ... had really been out in the world, not just a kid going to a college her mother taught at, for God's sake. From that, Charis knew that Rebecca had had no relationship yet. No serious fucking, for sure.

  Just a dreamer. Just hopeful dreaming. ...

  "Oh, I've been out in the world," Charis had said. "If you know the access codes and want to take the time, I think you can still find me on the Net."

  Rebecca, sitting at her desk doing her first-year Spanish--a hard course--had said, "Find you?"

  "Still see me on the Net, Becky.--I'm the six-year-old with the cock in her mouth."

  Rebecca had stared as if Charis had just grown another head that didn't look like her at all.

  "--See me doing that, and some other things. You'd be surprised."

  Rebecca had looked surprised.

  "I was there and in some magazine pictures, too. I was in Daddy's Daughter. I was in that one twice with just my white socks on--once with my father, Royce William Langenberg, and the next time with Philip and some other man. That time, I was eight."

  Rebecca had bowed her head, said, "Oh, Charis ..." looked down at her Spanish bo
ok and started to cry.

  She was a baby; that's all she was. She'd been crying for her father, too.

  Crying at night. ... Charis closed her eyes, drew her knees up and worked harder, pressing, turning her fist back and forth. Her vagina ached. She was hurt, and made a sound. Then she straightened her legs under the sheet and arched her back and came at last. ... It was such a relief. Such a relief, it was worth the trouble.

  The sheets smelled of her and sweat. Charis got up, changed the bed ... then put on her robe and went down the hall to the showers.

  When she came back, she dressed in jeans and a maroon T-shirt, her windbreaker and her running shoes. She packed an overnight bag, left a note for Rebecca--Gone down to Boston, back tomorrow--and left. It would be a long nighttime drive upstate.

  ... The Volkswagen's worn top was down for the first of morning air, blowing summer into the car. There were too many trees too close over the road for dawn to come quickly; it was easing in through the birches and oaks, so Charis drove gradually into daylight.

  She'd stopped twice--at a strip liquor store for the pint of vodka, hundred-proof ... then at Burleigh, at an all-night place, for gas and two chickenburgers--then had driven on up to Longford. ... There was no summer traffic on the roads, so far upstate and inland. Nothing to bring in tourists, unless they liked blue-necks' trash trailers in roadside clearings, and some tacky farms.--She'd been careful, never stopped at Longford the other times she'd come up here. Never asked anyone for directions, so she'd gotten lost twice the first time up, and once the time after that. But now she knew the way.

  The old man must have memories to keep him so far out in the boonies. A past--past love or whatever--to keep him at Lake Chaumette, which wasn't even much of a lake ... keep him in an old fish-camp cabin with a woodstove, at his age. She'd seen him cutting wood for the last of winter, and now even for the summer evenings, cooled by the wind off the lake ... his old man's blood running thinner and thinner.