Blind Descent-pigeion 6 (8 page)

  "How is Frieda doing?"

  Anna rolled over to see a woman hunkered down on her heels not three feet behind her. Anna had neither heard her coming nor sensed her presence. For protection, Frieda would have been better off with a Lhasa apso, she thought sourly.

  "She's going to be fine," she said firmly, hoping Frieda could hear and take comfort.

  The uninvited guest nodded slowly. She had a round bland face and dark hair pulled back under a bandana that had once been green. The kerchief was tied across her forehead in the fashion of pirates, artists, and outdoorswomen. "Frieda is one tough lady," she said after giving the matter some thought.

  Bovine, Anna thought, but it wasn't an insult. The woman brought to mind not the cow-like traits of stupidity or of being easily led, but of solidity and being slow to anger. The image was helped along by dark brown eyes, black and liquid in the dimness, and her size. She was nearly a match for the bearded man. Unfolded, she was probably close to five-ten with broad hips and heavy thighs. She wore shorts and a white tee-shirt, the sleeves rolled above her shoulders. A soft layer of fat hid the muscle, but Anna was willing to bet she was terrifically strong.

  "Zeddie Dillard," she said, and stuck out her hand. Damp hair curled from her armpits, and Anna was impressed. Zeddie wasn't more than twenty-four, yet she was as comfortable as an old hippie.

  "Anna Pigeon."

  Clanking cut into their exchange of pleasantries, and both looked to where the skinny woman knocked a cookstove into its component parts.

  "Tantrums on the River Styx?" Anna asked.

  "That's the doctor's wife," Zeddie replied with a careful lack of inflection. "And that's what's got her so pissed off."

  "That she's Peter McCarty's wife?"

  "That she's the doctor's wife."

  "Ah."

  "Zeddie Dillard, amateur psychiatrist and oracle to the stars," the woman said, and laughed. "Coffee?"

  Anna was warming right up to Ms. Dillard. "Cream?" she asked hopefully.

  "Better. Magic white powder that turns into cream if you stir it with a little plastic stick. It might not work down here," she added as she rose to her feet. "All there is to stir with is the community spoon."

  "I'll be with you as soon as I've visited the ladies' room," Anna said.

  Zeddie took a flashlight and used it to point out a black gateway between two sizable blocks of stones. "Unisex Johns. Easier on the cave," she said. "Put that pointy rock in the path. Privacy guaranteed."

  Destination confirmed, Anna worked her way up from the ground. Everything hurt. The aggressively three-dimensional nature of caves ensured that she had been battered equally from all directions. She felt as if she'd been beaten up by experts. Muscles unused for decades cried their lament as she hobbled toward the powder room. Bruises made themselves felt in places that never came into contact with anything more abusive than a down comforter or silk underpants.

  Nothing was easy.

  Anna was accustomed to the practice of cat-holing, digging tidy holes for waste and covering them. She'd burned enough toilet paper in the wilderness to raise the stock of Scott Tissue a point or two. And she knew why it wouldn't suffice. None of the normal elements of the terrestrial world were at work here, no self-cleaning features built in. Pack it in; pack it out. With stoicism if not good cheer, she completed her toilette as she'd been told: a neat rectangle of aluminum foil, Lisa's "burrito bag." Anna laughed in spite of herself.

  Zeddie was waiting with fresh-brewed water. Anna added brown powder and white powder and told herself it was coffee with cream. The group had gathered around an upended flashlight that took the place of a campfire. The people she'd observed earlier were there, as well as another man who had not been in camp before. In his forties, he looked in good physical condition. His hair was blond and cut short, reminiscent of the Nazis in World War II movies, but his face wasn't hard. If anything, he looked slightly timid, slightly aggrieved. He was clad in a muscle shirt and cutoffs so short Anna made a mental note not to get behind him on a steep climb unless she wanted to get to know him a whole lot better.

  Zeddie saw where she was looking and muttered, "Brent Roxbury. Fortunately for Brent, there are no fashion police in a cave."

  "Is Frieda any better?" Roxbury asked, interrupting their less-than kind gossip. The question sounded genuinely concerned, and Anna felt mildly guilty. To make it up to him, she forgave him the short-shorts.

  "The same," she replied, sorry she didn't have better news. As Anna looked at the ring of concerned faces, Frieda's words of the night before seemed absurd. It was possible she had been thinking clearly and yet had been mistaken. If a blow to the head could erase the trauma, surely it could scramble the facts. Frieda might have been recalling an event from the delirium, a dream so real that in a confused state it would be remembered as gospel. Memories could and were implanted, often so deeply that even faced with proof that an event never actually occurred, a person couldn't shake the feeling from muscle and bone that it had happened.

  If the words were true, just as Frieda had said, no psychological voodoo involved, then one of these individuals radiating sympathy and love had pushed a rock on her. Unfortunately, in a place as rigidly controlled and inaccessible as the bowels of Lechuguilla, the last minute solution of the wandering hobo with homicidal tendencies was unworkable.

  "We haven't met," Anna said to half the group, wanting to hear their voices, feel the clasp of their hands, in hopes a sense of their trustworthiness would be communicated.

  "Sondra McCarty," Zeddie said, adopting the hostess role. McCarty's wife was braiding her hair with both hands, a thick cloth covered band held ready in her teeth. Anna got neither a voice nor a handshake but merely a grunt and a nod.

  Zeddie went around the circle. "Dr. Curtis Schatz." The big man with the furry chin looked up from where he sat. His eyes were obscured by glasses framed in mock tortoiseshell. The lenses caught the light and reflected back blank space.

  "Hello," he said in a flat voice that gave absolutely nothing away and left Anna feeling snubbed.

  "Two doctors," she said just to say something. "That's lucky."

  "Not really," Schatz drawled, but without Holden's Texas warmth. A "Tennis, anyone?" effeteness lent his words a snobbish air. "I'm a doctor of leisure and recreation."

  Anna laughed, realized it was not a joke, and laughed again. "Sorry," she said.

  "No problem." Schatz returned to his coffee. Again no handshake. Near the center of the earth, life tended toward the informal.

  "Curt's a professor of leisure and recreational studies-park planning stuff-with a state university in New York." Zeddie came to Anna's rescue with the biographical details. "He's sketching this trip."

  Anna remembered Oscar discussing survey team responsibilities. Always, when mapping, besides measuring distances and surveying angles, someone sketched the rooms, the landmarks, the passageways, formations, fossils, and anything else of interest they could squeeze in. Depending on the sketch artist, the drawings varied from stick-like cartoon pictures that documented where an object was and its rough shape, to things of beauty in and of themselves.

  "This is Brent Roxbury." Zeddie introduced the last of the strangers as if they'd not already raked him over the coals for his sartorial inelegance.

  Brent did shake hands. His grip was firm and dry, as apparently sincere as his asking after Frieda's health.

  "Brent's a geologist," Frieda said. "He teaches and does a lot of work for the Park Service and the BLM."

  Sondra had finished her hair. She pushed forward and stuck out her hand. "I'm a freelance writer," she said. The gesture, belated, and the announcement were out of place. Anna wasn't put off by it. Though she couldn't remember exactly when or why, she knew there'd been a time when she was younger that she'd felt as she imagined Sondra was feeling: ignored, undervalued, outclassed. Her husband was a doctor. He was probably fifteen years her senior. It had to be a hard act to follow. Anna took the proffered hand. The woman's grip was hard, competitive. Anna resisted an impulse to shriek and sink to her knees in exaggerated pain.

  "I write travel and adventure articles for the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch and travel magazines in America and Great Britain." Her credentials and resume complete, she dropped Anna's hand.

  At a loss for an appropriate response, Anna mumbled, "How do you do?" and left it at that.

  Holden was pinching his wrist, pressing the minuscule button on the side of his watch. In the ubiquitous gloom even the green glow of a Timex night-light shone vividly. It was 6:23-A.M., Anna assumed. There was no way of knowing, but her body suggested she'd gotten four hours' sleep, not sixteen. In an hour or less, the team that followed, bringing gear and rigging, should arrive. This would be one of the last times this group would be alone together. As soon as the others came, the machinery of the rescue effort would fall in place and they would be swept up in the momentum.

  It was on the tip of Anna's tongue to ask what had happened, how Frieda had come to be hurt, when Holden said, "Okay, before the world starts happening to us, let's go over what we're going to need. Just us chickens. Everybody else is extra."

  Anna was just as glad her question had been preempted. It was too late to catch the perpetrator-if there was a perpetrator-off guard. Everyone had ample time to perfect a story. But, had she asked, an official version would have been created by the simple expedient of publicly relating it. Hearing five unofficial versions might prove more enlightening.

  Holden spoke just loud enough that one could hear if silence and attention were maintained. When Anna'd been in high school it had been one of Sister Mary Corrine's favorite techniques. Thirty years later and seven hundred feet underground, it still worked. They hung on Holden's every word. Three things were paramount: speed, care of the patient, and care of the cave. The rescuers would keep to the trails even when it made things more difficult. On Tillman's watch not a single aragonite crystal was to be sacrificed. Looking at each in turn, he told them their duties.

  Anna and Sondra were ladies-in-waiting. Their task was to see to Frieda, make sure she was comfortable and secure, calm her if she became agitated, let Holden know if she needed to rest. Peter was to focus on Frieda's health, commission any help he needed with drugs, dressings, and services, monitor her vital signs, and keep Holden apprised.

  Curt was given the task of carrying heavy objects. "Born to sherp," he said with a resignation that made Anna laugh. Zeddie was to carry packs and water. There would be others to help her, Holden promised, but it was her job to see that the core group-the eight of them-had what they needed during the carry-out and at the next camp. Holden estimated they could evacuate Frieda in approximately forty-eight hours; two twenty-hour days broken by an eight-hour sleep. Cavers from outside-and by this he meant anyone not in what he had chosen to call the core group-would bring in food, rigging, water, and medical supplies. There were people to lay phone line, prerig major obstacles at the Rift, the Boulder, and the entrance, and do liaison work and requisitioning. Cavers would be assigned to carry the Stokes when needed, and would cart out garbage and derig the hauls behind the evacuation party.

  At rests and in camp they would segregate themselves. Those outsiders who could or wished to would rotate to the surface to be replaced by fresher, rested people. Holden wanted Frieda to be surrounded by people she knew. He wanted to keep her trauma and stimulation to a minimum.

  For Frieda's peace of mind, Anna would be rigged with her on all the hauls, traveling up with the Stokes. When hands-on carrying of the litter was not required, only Anna, Dr. McCarty, and Sondra would be allowed near her. Holden didn't want Frieda swamped with good intentions.

  Anna listened with a growing sense of confidence. She could feel it spreading through the group. When she could get a moment alone with Holden or Oscar, she would tell them of Frieda's assertion that her injury was not accidental. Till then, the arrangement that kept her near Frieda and most others away was tailor-made for her needs.

  Lights flashed from the far end of Tinker's Hell. The cavalry had arrived, and the meeting broke up. Sondra McCarty waylaid Anna as she walked back to where Frieda lay.

  "Ladies-in-waiting," she said, her voice dripping with conspiratorial scorn. "That man's a dinosaur from the pregnant-and-barefoot school. Doesn't he think we're fit for men's work?"

  Anna was dumbstruck. For ten years she'd made a living doing what was traditionally considered men's work. Being a lady-in-waiting required more courage and stamina than she'd ever bargained for. "Hey," she said when her silence had grown too long to be considered polite. "It's a job."

  "Yeah. Well. For you, maybe," Sondra said, and Anna knew she'd been written off as hopelessly bourgeois.

  A team of twelve cavers rattled into camp, bringing a raucous confusion of light and sound. Packs were dumped and fallen upon, their innards jerked forth for inspection. Peter McCarty was handed a bundle earmarked for patient care. He tucked it under his arm and made a beeline for his patient. Until Anna knew for sure what had harmed Frieda, she didn't intend to let anyone mess with her unobserved, not even her private physician.