When We Were Animals(49)

Mr. Hunter paced back and forth below the stage, trying to explain the significance of the oil. He spoke of the blood of the land—faces gone black with crude, raised to the grimy rain of the stuff. He urged them to think about their own connection to the land, those reveled-in, mucky parts of themselves.

He always seemed to know I was there. He would come to the back and sit next to me, and we would watch the actors declaiming.

“They don’t get it, do they?” he said to me. “How can they not get it?”

“They might be a lot of different things,” I said, “but they can only be one thing at a time.”

He gazed at me with eyes that were accustomed to the dark, and I looked away, embarrassed.

I found myself returning to the quarry—the place where, two years before, Hondy Pilt was chased from the mouth of the mine by a possum. I liked the definition of the place, the artful ridges, the geometrical clefts, the shaved planes of earth—like God’s precise fingerprint. I bundled myself up against the cold and lay flat on the frozen earth at its very lowest point.

Once I heard the approach of others and fled to the mouth of the mine, where I watched in darkness a boy and a girl kissing each other on the berm, creating little landslides of pebbled stone. It was an hour before they were through. To keep myself occupied, I felt my way deeper into the mine, one hand flat against the wall, one directly in front of me so I wouldn’t run into anything in the pitch black, my feet moving an inch at a time so I wouldn’t tumble into an unseen shaft.

I liked it in there. The closeness. The dark. The feeling of being inside out.

What I did was I started mapping the mine.

In our garage, I found an old lantern, which I revived by cleaning the contacts and loading it with fresh D batteries. This was preferable to a regular flashlight for exploring the mine shafts because its light shone in all directions at once. I also carried a penlight in my pocket and held it in my teeth when I paused to inscribe some new part of the map in my notebook. I drew the map as I went. If I reached the edge of a notebook page, I continued on another page and coded both pages with letters and numbers that identified the sequence. I measured distances by my paces and noted those as well on long, straight passages. I drew in features of the mine as place markers. I knew to go left at the overturned mine cart because right was a dead end. I drew a picture of a collapsed wooden frame that looked like a crucifix because it marked the passage to a three-way split in the tunnels. For places where there were no natural markers, I brought along a hammer and nailed ribbons into the ground. The different colors of ribbon meant different things, and I wrote codes on them in marker that referred to the codes in my map notebook.

I carried a baggie of trail mix, too, for when I got hungry. And a stick to scare away possums and rats.

It was cold underground, and damp. The walls were wet with icy water, as though the thaw of spring had not penetrated to this stratum of the earth. I wore a plastic slicker, because sometimes the caverns rained on me, the water droplets echoing loudly in the confines of stone.

I was frightened each time I went—and I thought that I might die. People did die all the time in old mines. There were wide vertical shafts of pure black that seemed bottomless when I listened for the sound of the stones I dropped in them. But it was also peaceful there. And living and dying were not everything to me then.

It was clear that no one had gone deep into the mine in a very long time. The ground up to the first intersection was cluttered with empty bottles, flattened potato chip bags, torn sweaters, tin cans that had been shot through with holes or fashioned into marijuana-smoking devices, even a rotted teddy bear half buried in the packed dirt. But beyond that first intersection the atmosphere was thick with dust, and with my stick I had to brush away spiderwebs that quivered to and fro in the currents of stale air. Once I accidentally dislodged a rock and found a swarm of white spiders that ran off every which way and hid themselves in other fissures of stone.

What was I looking for? What did I seek?

I fantasized about finding some ancient miner who had lost his way in the caverns and never found his way out. He would have set up house somewhere deep underground, a pretty little cave of a living room lit by torches, a patchwork area rug made of discarded miner’s clothing.

He would greet me, knowing me on sight, of course, as a fellow dweller of the substrata. We would speak in the secret language that I knew must exist between travelers in the dark.

Sometimes I hummed as I went, and my voice in those caverns was like the sound of my voice in my own head when I closed the flaps of my ears.

I was accustomed to being alone.

I had been spelunking empty caverns my whole life. What I sought were the tunnels that led back underneath the town, the ones that would disclose all the buried truths of the place. There might be whole cities under the surface of the earth, populated by wise men who could see in the dark and who knew, better than I or anyone, how the secret gears of the world worked. And I could speak with them. And they would love me and call me their little light from above, and they would take me in as one of their own.

I had grown sick with questions—and what I searched for was a kingdom of answers.

*



Routine is important for people like me. It keeps us anchored in reality. It’s how we keep from spinning off into the ether.

After I went breach, I did my best to establish a new set of routines to accommodate the disturbances my life became subject to—to diminish their significance by making them normal. Every morning before I brushed my teeth, I examined the sheets of my bed. I knew I would find no blood, but the checking itself became the point. I made my demon disappointment into a simple pattern and so exorcised it. That’s how you keep things safe.