Abandon

EIGHTY

J

oss heard the roar in the distance and smelled the water. Melted candle drippings oozed onto her left hand, but she didn’t flinch, her fingers already coated with hardened white wax. She smiled because she recognized the sound of the cascade pouring into the subterranean lake where she and Lana had taken those first gorgeous gulps of water after leaving the main cavern. She might actually find her way back from here.

The flame quivered as she entered the waterfall room, and it would have extinguished in the draft, but she had it cupped with her right hand.

Joss climbed down the wet rock and knelt at the lake’s edge, figured it had been at least a full day since her last drink. She held the candle in her left hand and bent over and dipped her face into the water, letting it siphon into her mouth. As she drank, several icy drops splashed on the back of her head, probably runoff from an overhanging stalactite, but, too engrossed in sating her thirst, Joss didn’t distinguish the sudden hiss from the overwhelming crush of the waterfall.

When she lifted her head from the lake, she first noticed the odor of smoke, and then the black. Black beyond dreamless sleep or how she imagined death might be, like something had come along and snatched her eyes right out of their sockets.

She looked at her left hand, felt the candle in her fingers, saw only the faintest impression of the wick, fading from orange into amber.

“Calm the fuck down, Jocelyn. You got one match left.”

She reached under her serape into the lapel pocket of her cotton dress shirt, felt her fingers graze the sliver of sulfur-tipped wood.

She took it out, held it in front of her face.

“You’re holdin your life in that little splinter.”

She’d performed this trick any number of times, even derived a measure of pride from it, to the point that six years ago she’d thrown out the piece of flint she kept in the prayer book with her papers and tobacco.

The move was simple—lift her serape and shirt, strike the match against the middle of three buttons that fastened her canvas trousers.

She set the candle beside her on the rock and lifted her shirt, reaching down in the dark, fingering the trio of metal buttons.

She held the match in her right hand and closed her eyes. Instead of being in a cave, she imagined herself chained up behind the bar in that beautiful saloon of hers, chewing the dog with Bart or Oatha, flirting with Zeke, glaring at that porch-percher Al, nooning by the stove. She conjured the aroma of whiskey, the cold rancid sweat of hardworking men. No big deal. No great importance attached to this match. Just time for a cigarette.

In the darkness, her hand moved, the match gliding toward her crotch. She was trying not to overthink it, but she noted she couldn’t remember the last time she’d snapped a punk—this thought interrupted as she felt the match head graze the surface of the button.

Acrid bite of sulfur, then the match flared and the lake lighted up, firelight reflected in the water and the crystals, and she could have cried as she reached for the candle.

Her hand slid across wet rock—nothing there.

“The fuck?”

Already, the heat of the flame was descending toward her thumb and fore-finger.

She leaned onto her right buttock, thinking maybe she’d sat on it, but no. Now, carefully, bringing the flame over to the rock, searching the contours, the crystalline veins—still nothing—edging her fingers farther down the match as the flame pursued, desperation setting in, and the heat building, nowhere for her fingers to go now, the fire blackening her thumbnail, her teeth gritted, her skin beginning to bubble, and the last thing she saw before the flame smothered was the candle, three feet from the bank, floating in the lake.

Again, the black, and, as if her brain sensed she’d seen her last light, disorientation flooded in.

“You ain’t dead yet,” she said, rising to her feet. She still had her bearings. She couldn’t see it, but she knew that on the other side of this lake stood the opening to a flat tunnel she’d have to crawl through. From there, she’d take it one room at a time. No rush. No panic. She’d scream. Listen. She’d find them, or they’d find her.

Joss took baby steps along the rocky bank, arms outstretched. She came to a wall she couldn’t feel the top of, but there were handholds, so she climbed, the waterfall getting louder, as though she stood above it now. And still she climbed, uncertain, just grasping in the dark, trusting her arms and legs to take her where—

Her right foot slipped, and she gripped wet rock, feet scrambling for purchase, her fingers cramping.

It hit her—a load of buckshot colder than Emerald Lake in June, with more properties of liquid metal than water, the current dragging her toward that hole that drained the lake deep into the mountain, kept the depth constant.

She came up gasping, lungs, heart, muscles, bones stunned, standing now in two feet of freezing water, stumbling on, no intended direction or destination beyond someplace dry.

After awhile, her knees banged into the bank and she crawled up onto it and climbed until her head struck a wall.

“Goddamn it!”

The way her voice blared back in her face, she figured she’d crawled into some kind of alcove. The air smelled fixed, and her hands shook so hard, she couldn’t grasp the buttons on her cotton shirt.

She ripped it open, pulled her arms out of the sleeves, undid her trousers.

Her boots poured out several jars’ worth of water apiece, and then she sat there naked, shivering in the black and colder than she’d ever been in her life, leaning against a flat-topped rock, sizing up her predicament, chuckle-headed with shock.

“Well, you got a Chinaman’s chance now a gettin out a this hitch, you fuckin yack.” She wiped her eyes, humiliated, facing death, and realizing she didn’t have as much sand as she’d thought. This was worse than looking up a limb at the string party awaiting her in Arizona. No hiding from it—she was down-in-her-boots afraid, with not even a blanket to fill to calm her nerves.

She thought about Lana, wondered if she’d gotten herself back to Abandon, imagined that by now she’d freed everybody. They’d probably have a big meal of soft grub, outdoing even their Christmas Eve supper. But not her. She was done. Done being a saloonist, only thing she’d ever loved, never pour a shot of rotgut in that dog hole again, never taste whiskey, feel the sting of tobacco smoke inflating her lungs, never spread mustard with the rich, never exchange corral dust with the miners, never tell another bugged-up, bandbox, mail-order cowboy he weren’t shit and to take his ready-mades and get the fuck out, never scheme with another picaro.

“Got me, didn’t Ye?” she yelled. “Congratulations! You picked one fuckin helluva way to save me. This funny to You? Wearin a big smile up there? Let me tell You the straight goods. You think I’m gettin down on my knees now my leg’s tied up and I’m feelin poorly, gonna beg You to spare me, make amends for my behavior and pledge everlastin loyalty, You got another fuckin thing comin. Thought it’d be like gettin money from home breakin my ass down in front a my unshucked self? Thought You’d steal my dignity while You kilt me? Well, fuck You! Don’t know if You was watchin back there, but I saved Your child, Lana. Won my spurs, far as I’m concerned. Why You hate me? Tell You what. You all-powerful, all-knowin? We can call the shit even if You end me right now. Don’t care how You do it, long as it’s quick and—”

She didn’t see it, but she felt it.

The alcove shook and filled with dust.

The waterfall went mute.

Her lungs burned, and within thirty seconds, the sulfur gas had killed her.