“I come to ask if you’d go with me. I’m leavin this f**kin tomb, goin on into the cave, see if I can’t find water, some way out.”
Lana cut her eyes at Joss, the barkeep’s face distended and malformed in the lantern light.
“That a nod?”
Lana moved her head again.
“All right. Here, let me help you up. Hope you ain’t too weak to walk, ’cause I’m too damn weak to carry you.”
Joss lifted the shadowgee she’d stashed with Al’s body, lighted the candle, and set out with Lana into the cave. They progressed slowly, guided by candlelight, soon leaving the man-made tunnels and passing into karst terrain, traveling from room to room, Joss holding the shadowgee at head level to avoid walking into stalactites.
An hour out from the main cavern, they entered a small grotto. Water seethed out of the floor into a rimstone pool, and Lana ran to it, already on her knees and bringing a cupped handful to her mouth.
“Think you might regret that.”
Lana stared down at the spring, tiny bubbles streaming up from cracks in the bottom, the surface appearing to boil. She touched her tongue to it, the water bitter and caustic, heavily alkalied.
“Poisoned them, don’t you bet?”
Still, Lana almost drank it.
She watched the water slip through her fingers as Joss swiped extra candles from the two dead miners.
The hall echoed with the noise of the waterfall, the light too gentle to show its vast dimensions. They stood on the shore of a subterranean lake, its bed of white crystals shining under the rays of firelight that shot out through the perforated can.
The shadowgee clanged against the rock, and the women fell to their knees, bent down, put their faces into the water. Lana coughed up the first two swallows, but when she finally got some down, it was so cold and good, it made her head ache.
They sat on the bank, drinking until their stomachs bulged and Joss had to loosen the button on her canvas trousers.
She said, “Lana, you don’t wanna know what I’d do to have one cigarette left in my dream book and some Mexican common doins—few hot rocks, menudo, bottle a mescal. Keep thinkin I hear someone bangin the angle iron. Tell you what—I’d swear off whiskey for a meal.”
They wandered on inside the mountain, nothing but rock and shadows and firelight, Lana feeling certain that days must be passing for all their time in this underworld.
She was halfway through one of Haydn’s concertos when Joss stopped, turned around, and said, “I think we better try to go back.” The way her voice carried, Lana pictured them standing in a large cavern. “I don’t have clue f**kin one as to our coordinates, but maybe Stephen came back after all or they got the door open. Hate for us to miss that blowout.”
Lana shook her head.
“What?”
She reached down, touched her feet, grimaced.
“Oh, you’re tired? Well, hell, I am, too. Maybe we should catch forty winks first. Let’s find a decent spot.”
They went a little ways farther, until they found a room where the rock was level.
“Your suite, Miss Hartman,” Joss said. “Hope you find everthin to your likin. Here, we have some rock. Over here, some more rock. Oh, and here’s some more f**kin rock. I hope you like rock.”
Lana smiled.
“Ain’t seen many a those.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
The two women lay on the rock, nestled together for warmth and blanketed under Lana’s woolen cape and Joss’s serape. Lana’s headache had eased since she’d filled her stomach with water, but the reprieve of pain only made room for the deep hunger.
Joss said, “We got three candles left. Hope that’ll get us somewhere better’n this. I’m blowin us out for a while.”
Lana heard a puff and the room went black.
It was perfectly silent, cold.
She felt Joss take hold of her hand.
“Believe this shit? I don’t. Guess it beats turnin into a cottonwood blossom, bag over my head, rope around my neck, squirmin before a bunch a damn strangers. You warm enough? Squeeze my hand if you are.”
Lana squeezed.
“Good.” They were quiet for a while, Lana wondering if sleep would come more easily in the absence of psychotic thirst.
“You always been a mute? Squeeze once for yes, twice for no, three times for shut the f**k up, Joss.”
Two squeezes.
“Just curious is all. Take no offense. You spoke recently? Like in your adult life?”
One squeeze.
“How long since you went quiet?”
Three soft squeezes.
“Three years?”
One squeeze.
“That sound you hear is the wheels turnin inside my head, wonderin what the f**k happened to you. Was you met upon by some horrific occurrence?”
One squeeze.
“Somebody hurt you three years ago.”
One squeeze.
“A man?”
Squeeze.
“Cocksuckers, all. Was you a whore?”
Two squeezes.
“This the work a your husband or—”
One squeeze.
“Lemme venture a guess. . . . He caught you steppin out?”
“Two squeezes.”
“Well, as our mode a communication would take about four f**kin centuries to unriddle this mystery, I’ll leave it at this. You’re a sweet human bein and for whatever reason you caught a rough shake, and I’m real sorry and I wish it hadn’t . . .”
The ceiling glowed, both women gasping as the moon edged into view, nearly full and faintly yellowed, the color of ancient paper, their rocky prison shellacked with placid light.
“I shit you not, this is the first piece a luck I ever had.”
The moon’s brief framing in the chimney window ended, and it shrank away, continuing along its predestined path across the sky, stranding them once more in darkness.
Joss held the shadowgee above their heads and stared at the ceiling.
“You lift me, I believe I can scramble up that. Squat down.”
Lana knelt and Joss straddled her shoulders.
“All right, raise me up slow like.”
Lana stood, surprised by how light Joss was—barely a hundred pounds—and the weight soon lifted off her shoulders.
Joss began to climb, holding the shadowgee in her teeth, clawing her way up the rock, the candlelight dwindling.
Lana glanced around at the darkness on all sides.
“Fuck!” Joss had stopped, perched fifteen feet up the chimney, muttering to herself. Then she was moving again, but coming back down, the room re-warming with candlelight.