Eric’s knee had stopped bleeding finally. There was a steady, throbbing ache, which jumped in volume whenever he shifted his weight. Jeff’s T-shirt was stiff with dried blood; Eric set it on the ground beside him. His shoe still felt damp.
Eric told Pablo how people healed—implacably—how the worst part was the accident itself, then the body went to work, mobilizing, rebuilding. Even now, even as they were talking, it was beginning to happen. He told Pablo about the bones he’d broken as a child. He described falling on a wet sidewalk and cracking his forearm—he couldn’t remember which bone, the radius, maybe, or the ulna; it didn’t matter. He’d had a cast for six weeks, the end of the summer; he could remember the stink of it when they cut it off, sweat and mildew, his arm looking pale and too thin, his terror of the whirling saw. He’d broken his collarbone playing Superman, flying headfirst down a playground slide. He’d broken his nose falling off a pogo stick. And he described all of these accidents for Pablo now, in detail, the pain of each one, the course of his eventual recovery: his implacable, inevitable recovery.
Pablo couldn’t understand a single word of this, of course. He moaned and muttered. Occasionally, he’d lift the arm Eric wasn’t holding and seem to reach for something at his side, though Eric couldn’t guess what, since there was nothing there but darkness. Eric ignored this movement—the moaning and muttering, too—he just kept talking, working at it, his voice high and falsely cheerful. He couldn’t think of anything else to do.
He told Pablo of other accidents he’d witnessed: a boy who’d skate-boarded into traffic (a concussion and a handful of broken ribs), a neighbor who’d tumbled off his roof while cleaning out the gutters (a dislocated shoulder, a pair of broken fingers), a girl who’d mistimed her jump from a rope swing, landing not in the river, as intended, but upon its rocky bank (a shattered ankle, three lost teeth). He talked about the town where he’d been raised, how small it was, how ugly and provincial, yet somehow picturesque in its ugliness, somehow worldly in its provincialism. When a siren sounded, people went to their front doors, stepped out onto their porches, shaded their eyes to see. Children jumped on bicycles, raced after the ambulance or fire truck or police car. There was gawking involved, of course, but also empathy. When Eric had broken his arm, neighbors had come calling, bearing gifts: comic books for him to read, videos to watch.
He kept hold of Pablo’s wrist with his right hand while he talked, squeezing sometimes to emphasize certain points, never letting go. His left hand moved back and forth between the oil lamp and the box of matches, touching one and then the other in a continuous, restless circuit, moving lightly across them, as if they were beads on a rosary. And there was something prayerful about the gesture, too; it was accompanied by a pair of words in his head. Yet, even as he told his tales to Pablo in his confident, assertively optimistic voice, he was silently repeating the two words, chanting them internally while his hand shifted from lamp to matches to lamp to matches: Still there, still there, still there, still there…
He described for Pablo what it had felt like to ride his bicycle in pursuit of the sirens, the flashing lights. The excitement—that giddy feeling of drama and disaster. He told him of happy endings. Of seven-year-old Mary Kelly, who knew how to climb a tree but not how to get down, her fear making her scramble higher and higher, crying as she went, pulling her tiny body upward, forty feet, into the very crown of an ancient oak, a crowd gathering beneath her, calling to her, urging her back down, while a wind came up, gradually increasing, making the branches sway, the entire tree seeming to dip and rise. He imitated for Pablo the collective gasp when she almost slipped, dangling for an excruciatingly long string of seconds before she managed to regain her foothold, crying all the while, the sirens approaching, the boys on their bicycles. Then the fire truck with its ladder slowly angling skyward, the cheers when the paramedic leaned deep into the foliage, grasped the little girl by her arm, yanked her toward him, throwing her over his shoulder.
Eric had the sudden sense, in the darkness, of a hand touching the small of his back. He jumped, almost yelped, but caught himself. It was just the vine. Somehow, it had managed to take root down here, too, at the bottom of the shaft. He must’ve leaned into it as he talked, creating the impression of its having reached out and touched him, cradling him at the base of his spine, almost caressing him. It was impossible to keep his bearings here; he was as good as blind. All he had to orient himself was Pablo’s wrist and— still there, still there, still there —the oil lamp and the box of matches. He slid forward to escape the vine’s touch—it was creepy, and it made him shiver; he didn’t like it—shifting until he was right up against Pablo’s broken body. When he moved, there was a sharp, tearing pain from the cut in his knee, and it started to bleed again. He patted at the ground, searching for Jeff’s T-shirt, then pressed it once more to the wound.
He circled back to the girl on the rope swing; Marci Brand, thirteen years old. She’d had braces and a long brown ponytail. He told Pablo how they’d all laughed at first, seeing her fall, he and the other children. There’d been something comical about it, cartoonlike. They’d watched her drop, heard that awful slapping sound as she hit the rocks; everyone must’ve known she was hurt. But they’d laughed, all of them, as if to deny this, to undo it, stopping only when they saw her try to stand, then crumple awkwardly, falling onto her side and sliding down the rocky bank into the water. Her mouth was cut—she’d hit her face against the stones—and a murky cloud of blood slowly formed around her in the water as she floated there, thrashing her arms. Her eyes were clenched shut, Eric remembered, her expression contorted. She was grimacing, but not crying; she didn’t make a sound, not even when they pulled her out, dragging her back up onto the bank while one of them rode off on his bicycle to get help. Later, they all felt guilty about having laughed, especially when it looked as if she might not be able to walk again. But she did, eventually— implacably, inexorably —with a slight limp, perhaps, although this was barely noticeable, not noticeable at all, really, unless you knew the story, unless you were watching for it.
Now and then, Eric thought he could see things in the darkness—floating shapes, balloonlike, faintly luminescent. They seemed to approach, then hover right in front of him before slowly withdrawing again. Some had a bluish green tint; others were a faint yellow, almost white. These were tricks his eyes were playing on him, he knew, physiological reactions to the darkness, but he couldn’t help himself: whenever they appeared to come especially close, he’d relinquish his grip on Pablo’s wrist so that he could try to touch them. As soon as he’d lift his hand, though, the shapes would vanish, only to reappear at some new spot, farther away, and resume their slow, gently bobbing approach. He took the T-shirt away from his cut knee. The wound had stopped bleeding again. Immediately, he reached for the lamp, the matches: still there, still there ….
He told Pablo other stories, too, tales that hadn’t ended so happily— implacably, inexorably —changing them for the wounded man’s benefit. Little Stevie Stahl, who was swept into a storm sewer while playing in a flooded field, was no longer discovered by a volunteer scuba diver, half-buried in silt, bloated beyond recognition. No: he reappeared five minutes later and almost a mile away, spit out into the river, cut and bruised and crying, it was true, but otherwise, miraculously, unharmed. And Ginger Ruby—who’d set her uncle’s garage on fire while playing with a book of matches, and then, disoriented by the smoke and her rising panic, fled away from the door through which she could’ve easily escaped, and died crouching against the back wall, behind a row of garbage cans—was, in Eric’s retelling of the story, saved by a fireman, brought out to the cheers of the gathered crowd, gasping and coughing and covered with soot, her shirt and hair scorched, but otherwise (yes, miraculously) unharmed.
The cold air coming from the open shaft on the far side of Pablo’s body wasn’t constant. Sometimes it would stop, seem to hold its breath, and the temperature in the hole would instantly begin to rise. Eric would start to sweat, his shirt growing damp with it, and then, abruptly, the cold air would return. This constant fluctuation unsettled Eric, frightened him, made the darkness within the shaft seem threateningly animate. Each time the draft paused, he felt as if it had been blocked by someone—or something—a presence that was hesitating just in front of him, examining and appraising him. Once, he even thought he heard it sniffing, taking in his scent. His senses were playing tricks again, he knew. But still, he had to resist the urge to light the lamp, his hand pausing, wavering, then resuming its steady back and forth: still there, still there, still there.
He told Pablo of his friend Gary Holmes, who’d dreamed of becoming a pilot. Gary had badgered and cajoled and begged his parents, wearing them down year by year, until they finally gave him flying lessons for his sixteenth birthday. Every Saturday, he’d ride his bicycle out to the local airport and spend the afternoon there, entering this new world. Three months into it, Eric was playing soccer—a youth league, four separate games going on at once, the fields lying parallel to one another. A small plane flew over, very low, buzzing them, the players pausing for a reflexive instant as the aircraft’s shadow swept across them, everyone ducking involuntarily, then peering upward. The plane flew on, banked, made another pass, the games stuttering to a more complete halt. The referees blew their whistles; they were waving their arms, struggling to restore order, when the plane banked a second time, its engine stuttering, coughing, falling silent. And then—a handful of seconds later, the time it takes to breathe, exhale, breathe again—from somewhere within the wooded area west of the fields came the slamming, splintering, crunching sound of the crash. Not in the version Eric shared with Pablo, though. No, as Eric told the story, someone had understood what was happening on that very first low pass. One of the coaches, then another. They began to shout, pointing, the referees joining in with their whistles, everyone yelling suddenly, running. The plane was in distress; it was attempting an emergency landing. They needed to clear the fields. And they did it. By the time the plane had banked, returned for its second pass, everyone was crowded back against the sidelines. The plane landed roughly, bouncing, crashing through one of the wooden goals, its front wheels digging into the soft earth, nearly flipping it, so that it finally came to rest tipped forward on its nose, its propeller bent, its windshield cracked. Eric hesitated for a moment here, struggling to imagine what Gary and his instructor’s injuries might’ve been, how that plane’s abrupt return to earth would’ve battered the two bodies in its cockpit. A shattered kneecap, he decided. A dislocated shoulder, a cracked pelvis, a mild concussion. He waved these aside even as he listed them. They all healed, he assured Pablo, as such injuries always do—yes, once again— implacably, inexorably.
The others were busy up above, braiding the strips of nylon they’d cut from the blue tent, building their backboard; they didn’t have time to think. But Eric was down here in the dark, with the smell of Pablo’s shit and urine, the rising and falling of his moans, his muttering. So it was probably natural that he was the first of them to begin to wonder if the Greek might not survive this adventure, if his body had moved beyond the realm of implacable and inexorable, if he was, after all, going to die in the coming hours or days while they hovered helplessly about him.
It seemed as if Pablo might’ve fallen asleep—or lost consciousness. He’d stopped muttering, anyway, stopped moaning, stopped reaching out into the darkness for whatever it was that he imagined to be waiting there for him to grasp. Eric fell silent, too, sat beside Pablo, holding his wrist with one hand, touching the lamp, the matches with the other. Time seemed to pass even more slowly without the sound of his voice echoing back at him from the shaft’s narrow walls. His thoughts returned to Gary Holmes, to the photograph of the mangled plane on the front page of the local paper, the memorial service in the high school auditorium.
Gary had been a friend of his—not a close one, but more than an acquaintance, and, a month after the funeral, Gary’s mother had stopped by Eric’s house. “Eric?” his own mother had called. “There’s someone here to see you.”
Eric had hurried downstairs, to find Mrs. Holmes standing in the front hall. She’d come to ask if he wanted Gary’s bicycle. It was an odd, awkward encounter; Eric’s mother had stood there watching them talk, looking tearful. She kept reaching out to touch Mrs. Holmes’s shoulder. Eric had felt startled by the request, and strangely embarrassed—after all, he hadn’t been that close to Gary. He tried to decline the offer, only to change his mind when he saw how stricken Mrs. Holmes looked at the first, hesitant shake of his head. Yes, he said. Of course he’d take the bike. He thanked her, and then his mother was crying in earnest. So was Mrs. Holmes.
The bicycle was still at the airport, locked to the chain-link fence where Gary had left it that final day. Eric’s father dropped him off there early one morning, on his way to work, and Eric claimed the bike, hunching over it with the slip of paper Mrs. Holmes had given him, squinting to decipher her handwriting, the three numbers for the combination lock. He had to try it a half dozen times before it worked, and then he rode off, straight to school, a fifteen-mile trip, arriving a few minutes late, the first bell having already rung, the halls silent and empty. The bicycle’s seat had been too high for him, making it difficult to pedal; the chain needed oil; the rims were rusting from having sat out in the weather for the past month. It wasn’t a thing to feel proud of, and he already had his own bike anyway—perhaps it was this, or else simply that he was late, but he didn’t lock the bicycle when he arrived at school; he tossed it down against the rack and hurried inside. He left it there that night, too, still unlocked, taking the bus home instead. And in the morning, it was gone.
There was that pressure against Eric’s back once more, a hand touching him. He felt his heart jump in his chest even as he struggled to reassure himself. It was just the vine. He must’ve slouched back into it again. He shifted toward Pablo, only to realize that he was already as close to the Greek as he could get. The vine had moved somehow, crept toward him, drawn by his warmth, perhaps. It made him uneasy, a little scared, to think of the vine like this—something volitional, almost sentient—it made him want to flee the hole altogether. He thought about shouting upward, calling to the others, but he stopped himself at the last instant, worried that he’d wake Pablo from his sleep.
Gary’s mother had gone from house to house, passing on her son’s possessions to boys who didn’t know what to do with them. Boys who lost her son’s sweaters and jackets, his baseball mitt and swim goggles, who gave them away or discarded them outright, who buried them in closets and trunks and basements. This was the way death always worked, Eric supposed; the living did everything possible to sweep all evidence of it from sight. Even Gary’s closest friends continued forward with their lives, unmarred in any significant way by his absence, climbing from grade to grade, then leaping off into college, forgetting him as they went, remembering instead that photograph of the crumpled plane, the abrupt silence on the soccer fields before its crash.
Eric had to pee. But he was afraid to stand up and step toward the wall of the shaft to do this, irrationally frightened that the Greek or the lamp or the matches would no longer be there when he returned. He unbuckled his belt to ease the pressure on his bladder, tried to distract himself with word games, making up a vocabulary test for his future students, beginning with the A ’s, ten words, a little quiz to start the week, five points for the definitions, five for the spelling.
Albatross,he thought. Avarice. Annunciation. Alacrity. Armament. Adjacent. Arduous. Accentuate. Accommodate. Allegation.
He was just turning to the B ’s— Boisterous. Bravado. Bandoleer. Botanist —when that electronic chirping began again, waking Pablo, startling them both. Eric let go of the Greek’s wrist, stood up, the wound on his knee making him stagger-step, like a clubfoot. The chirping seemed to be coming from his right, yet when he limped toward it, he realized he was wrong. It was coming from behind him now. He started to turn, but then wasn’t so certain. It seemed to be circling him, drifting along the walls of the shaft.
“Eric?” Jeff yelled down. “Can you find it?”
Eric craned his head back. He could see them leaning into the rectangle of blue sky. He called up, told them how it was moving on him, first in one direction, then another.
“Is there a light?” Jeff shouted. “Look for a light.”
The sound seemed to be coming from the opening beyond Pablo’s body now, just inside the mouth of the shaft. Eric limped past Pablo, the air growing noticeably cooler. The chirping retreated, as if to draw him down the shaft. He hesitated, frightened suddenly. “I don’t see it,” he called. And then the chirping fell silent. “It’s stopped,” he yelled. He counted to ten inside his head, waiting for it to start again, but it didn’t. When he peered up at the mouth of the hole, the heads had vanished and the sky had taken on a reddish tint. The sun was beginning to set.
He hobbled back to Pablo’s body. He could sense him moving in the darkness, shifting his head, but he remained silent. He didn’t resume his moaning or muttering, and this frightened Eric.
“Pablo?” Eric said. “You okay?” He wanted the Greek to start speaking again, but he just lay there, motionless now. Eric reached for the lamp, found it, reached for the matches, and…they weren’t there. He patted at the rocky floor of the shaft, in a slowly widening circle, with a sense of growing panic. He couldn’t find the box.
There was a creaking sound above him, and he looked up. The sky was rapidly growing dark, but he could see something silhouetted against it, an oblong shape, almost filling the hole. They’d finished their backboard, were setting it into place. He kept patting at the ground, reaching farther and farther away from himself, then returning to the lamp, starting outward again. But the matches weren’t there.
The creaking grew louder, steadier, and he glanced up again. They were lowering the backboard into the shaft. “Eric?” he heard Amy call.
“What?” he yelled.
“Light the lamp!” She was on the backboard, he realized, dropping slowly toward him.
He stood up, limped a step, thinking that he might’ve been holding the matches when the chirping began, might’ve carried them with him as he started off to discover the source of the sound, only, absentmindedly, to set them down again. It didn’t make sense, and he didn’t really believe in it, but then he took another step and his foot hit something, kicking it, and he knew by the noise it made, by the way it felt against his foot, that it was the box of matches. He lowered himself carefully to his hands and knees, began to pat the ground, searching.
The creaking continued. The sky had grown dark now; he couldn’t see the backboard any longer, but he could sense its approach. “Light the lamp, Eric,” Amy called again. She was closer now, and there was an urgency to her voice. She sounded scared.
He kept patting at the ground. He was in a corner of the shaft that the vine had colonized fairly aggressively; his hands kept getting tangled in its tendrils, giving him the eerie sensation that the plant was purposefully impeding him. When he finally found the box of matches, it was buried underneath the vine, almost completely covered by it. Eric had to tug it free, tearing at the plant, its sap sticking damply to the fingers of his left hand, cool at first, then suddenly burning.
“Eric?” Amy shouted again. She was almost upon him.
“Just a sec,” he called. He hobbled back to the lamp, crouched over it, lifted its glass globe. He didn’t realize how badly his hand was trembling until he struck the first match: he was shaking so much that it immediately fluttered out. He had to take a moment, two deep breaths, working to calm himself, then try again. This time, he was successful—he lighted the lamp—and there Amy was, barely fifteen feet up, peering anxiously down at them, dropping, dropping, dropping.
He had to turn away from the lamp’s brightness after so many hours sitting in the dark, but, even so, the flame was somehow fainter than he’d remembered—or than he’d hoped, perhaps. Much of the shaft remained shadowed, impenetrably so. His hand was burning from the vine’s sap. He wiped it on his pants, but it didn’t help.
When the backboard came within reach, he took hold of it, guiding it slightly to the right so that it would come to rest at Pablo’s side, but then, with three feet still to go, it jerked to a halt, almost toppling Amy off her perch.
“Amy?” Jeff called from above.
“What?” she shouted.
“Have you reached them?”
“Almost. A few more feet.”
There was a brief silence while this information was absorbed. Then: “How many?”
Amy leaned, peered down off the backboard at Pablo’s broken body. “I don’t know. Three?”
“It’s the end of the rope,” Jeff called. There was a pause. Then: “Can you still do it?”
Amy and Eric looked at each other. The whole point of the backboard was to keep Pablo’s spine straight while he was lifted: without it, there’d be twisting or bending, which would, of course, cause further damage to his injured body. But if they decided to wait, it meant winching the backboard back up, taking it off the rope, braiding another length of nylon, reattaching the backboard, dropping the whole thing down the shaft once more, all of this attempted in complete darkness.
“What do you think?” Amy asked Eric. She was still crouched on the backboard, though she could’ve easily slid to the ground. It seemed as if she didn’t want to attempt this, as if she felt it might commit her to a task she was still hoping she could evade.
Eric struggled for something that might approximate thought; it wasn’t easy. He noticed a shovel leaning against the far wall of the shaft—a camp shovel, the type that could be folded up and carried in a backpack—and he spent a long moment staring at it, trying to imagine a way in which it might be useful to them. He couldn’t come up with anything, though, and when the words grave digger popped into his head, he almost flinched, as if he’d picked up something hot.
“We can undo the backboard,” he said. “Put him on it, then lift it up and tie it back on.”
“By ourselves?” Amy asked. It was clear she didn’t think this was possible.
Eric shook his head. “They’ll have to lower someone else to help. Stacy, I guess. Two of us to lift him, one to tie the knots.”
They thought about this for a moment, imagining all the steps, the time it would take.
“We’ll need to blow out the lamp,” Eric said. “Wait for her in the dark.”
Amy shifted her weight, and the backboard began to swing. Eric extended his hand, stopped it. He thought she was going to climb off it, but she didn’t.
“Or we can just lift him ourselves,” he said.
Amy was silent, staring down at Pablo. Eric wished she’d say something. He couldn’t do this by himself.
“It’s only a few feet.”
“If he twists—”
“I could take his shoulders. You take his feet. One, two, three—easy as that.”
Amy frowned, uncertain.
Eric lifted the lamp, tilted it, examining its reservoir, the diminishing pool of oil. “We have to decide,” he said. “The light’s not going to last.”
“Amy?” Jeff called.
They both craned their heads to look, but it had grown too dark up there to see him.
“We’re gonna try it,” she yelled.
Eric held the backboard steady while she climbed off, then he set the oil lamp on the ground. Amy gathered the belts from the sleeping bag, dropped them next to the lamp. Pablo was watching them, his eyes moving back and forth from one to the other.
“We’re going to pick you up,” Amy said to him. She made a lifting motion with her hands, palms open, then pointed to the backboard. “We’re going to put you onto here, and then hoist you up and out.”
Pablo stared at her.
Eric moved to the Greek’s head; Amy stood at his feet.
“His hips,” Eric said.
Amy hesitated. “You sure?”
“If you lift from his feet, he’ll bend at the waist.”
“But if I lift at his hips, won’t he end up arching his back?”
They both stared down at Pablo, picturing these two different scenarios. It was a bad idea, Eric knew. They should send the backboard back up, have them lengthen the rope. Or at least have Stacy come join them. He glanced toward the lamp. It was nearly out of oil.
“At his knees,” Eric said.
Amy considered this, but not long enough. A handful of seconds, and then she crouched over Pablo’s knees. Eric bent, sliding his hands under the Greek’s shoulders. He could feel the cut on his leg stretching, tearing, beginning to bleed again. Pablo groaned, and Amy started to pull away, but Eric shook his head.
“Quickly,” he said. “On three.”
They counted together: “One…two…three.”
And then they lifted.
It was a disaster—far worse than Eric had feared. It seemed to take forever, and yet it happened so fast. They’d barely gotten him off the ground before Pablo began to scream—even more loudly than before, if possible, a pure shriek of pain. Amy almost gave up, almost set him back down on the ground, but Eric shouted at her—“No!”—and she kept going. Pablo’s body sagged at the waist; he began to thrash his arms. His scream went on and on. His body was too heavy for Amy; she couldn’t keep up with Eric. The Greek’s shoulders were level with the backboard now, but his knees were still a good foot beneath it, and it looked as if Amy might not be able to lift them any higher. The bend at Pablo’s waist increased. His right arm, flailing, hit the backboard, and it began to swing wildly back and forth.
“Lift!” Eric shouted at Amy, and she tried to hoist Pablo’s legs higher, lunging, the Greek’s torso twisting, his screams going higher.
Afterward, Eric wasn’t even certain how they managed it. It was as if he’d had some sort of blackout in those final moments. He had the impression that they’d been reduced, finally, to making a lurching sort of toss toward the swaying backboard, throwing the Greek’s body onto it. All he knew was that he felt terrible, as if he’d absentmindedly stepped on an infant. Amy had begun to cry, was standing there, looking stricken.
“It’s okay,” Eric said. “He’ll be okay.” He didn’t think she could hear him, though, because Pablo was still screaming. Eric had the urge to vomit, his tongue going thick, bile rising in his throat. He forced himself to breathe. His leg was bleeding again, draining wetly into his shoe, and, once more, he was abruptly conscious of his bladder. “I have to pee,” he said.
Amy didn’t even look at him. She stood with her hand over her mouth, watching Pablo shriek, the lower half of his body perfectly still while his arms flailed about, the backboard continuing to swing to and fro. Eric limped to the wall, unzipped, began to urinate. By the time he was through, Pablo had started to quiet. His eyes were tightly clenched; there were beads of sweat standing on his forehead.
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