The Genocides

FOURTEEN The Way Up

The quiet, which for months had been absolute, was broken by the trickling of the sap. It was a sound like the sound of water in early spring, flowing through the town gutters underneath unmelted banks of snow.

While they rested they did not speak, for the most innocuous statements could throw Neil into a state of hysterical excitement. Naturally, they knew better than mention Anderson or Alice, but why, when Buddy began to worry out loud about his wife and son, should Neil complain that he was “selfish,” that all he thought about was sex? When Orville spoke of their predicament and speculated (with more good cheer than he felt) on their chances of reaching the surface, Neil thought they were blaming him. Silence seemed altogether the best policy, but Neil could not endure more than a few moments of silence either. Then he would start to complain: “If only we’d brought down the lamp, we wouldn’t be having any trouble now.” Or, remembering one of his father’s favorite themes: “Why do I have to do the thinking for everybody? Why is that?”

Or he would whistle. His favorite tunes were the Beer-Barrel Polka, Red River Valley, Donkey Serenade (which he accompanied percussively with the popping of his cheeks), and the theme from Exodus. Once he had started any of these, he could go on perpetuum mobile for the duration of the time they rested. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been able to stay in the same key for eight bars running.

It was hardest for Buddy. Blossom and Orville had each other. In the darkness they would hold each other’s hands, while Neil ground out the tune one more time around, like a diligent monkey; they could even kiss, quietly.

Here there was neither north nor south, east nor west; there was only up and down. There were no measurable units of distance, only rough estimates of temperature and depth, and their only measure of elapsed time was the time it took their bodies to drop, too exhausted to continue without another rest.

They never knew whether they were at the periphery or near the heart of labyrinth. They might ascend, through channels already opened, to within a few hundred feet—or even ten—of the surface only to find themselves at a dead end. It was necessary not simply to find a way up but to find the way up. It was hard to make Neil understand why this was so. When Blossom had explained it to him, he had seemed to agree, but later when Orville brought up the subject again, the argument started all over.

They were soaked through with their own sweat and with the sap, which in the least steep roots reached levels of four and five inches. After hours of climbing they were at a height where the heat was not so overwhelming (the lower depths felt like a sauna), and the air seemed to be gas again. Orville estimated the temperature as seventy-five, which placed them a probable fifteen hundred feet from the surface. Ordinarily, over a known route, they could have climbed that height in little more than three hours. Now it might very well take days.

Orville had hoped that the flow of sap would abate as they reached higher levels; instead it was worsening. Where did it all come from? The logistics of the Plant’s water supply was something he had never stopped to consider. Well, he couldn’t stop now either.

You couldn’t just grab hold of a vine and haul yourself up the slope; you had to make your hand into a sort of hook and slip it into a stirrup. You couldn’t just reach back and help the next person up after you; you had to grapple the two hooks together. So it was always the hands that hurt worst and were first to give out. You’d hang there and feel them letting loose, and you’d hope that you wouldn’t slide back with the sap too far. Once you let go, it wasn’t so bad—you’d slide along soft and easy if the slope wasn’t too steep, or else shoot down like a toboggan, until you came up against someone or something with a bump, and then you had to get your hooks bent back into shape and start clawing your way back up through the slime. But you knew your body could go a long way yet, and you hoped that would be far enough.

They might have been climbing twelve or twice twelve hours. They had eaten and rested a few times, but they had not slept. They had not slept, in fact, since before the night of Anderson’s dying and Maryann’s delivery. Now it must be night again. Their minds were leaden with the necessity for sleep.

“Absolute necessity,” Orville repeated.

Neil objected. This was just going to be a resting period. He feared that if he went to sleep first, they would take away his gun. They weren’t to be trusted. But if he just sat here and let his body relax… dog-tired, that’s what he….

He was the first to sleep after all, and they didn’t take his gun. They didn’t care. They didn’t want his gun: they only wanted to sleep.

Neil’s repertoire of dreams was no larger than his stock of songs. First he dreamed his baseball dream. Then he was walking up the stairs of the old house in town. Then he dreamed of Blossom. Then he dreamed his baseball dream again, except this time it was different: when he opened the closet door, his father was the first baseman. Blood spurted from the deep cleft of the first baseman’s mitt, which opened and closed, opened and closed, in the dead man’s hand. But otherwise the dreams were just the same as always.

The next day, after an hour or so, the hurt went out of their hands, and it was the stickiness that was hardest to endure. Their clothes clung to their straining limbs or hung loose and heavy like skins that could not be sloughed off. “We’d move faster,” Orville said, “if we weren’t weighted down with these denim jackets.”

Somewhat later, since it appeared that the idea was not going to come to Neil of itself, Buddy added, “If we knotted our jackets together, sleeve to sleeve, and used them for rope, we could climb faster.”

“Yeah,” Neil said, “but you’re forgetting there’s a lady with us.”

“Oh, don’t bother about me,” Blossom protested.

“Just our jackets, Neil. It wouldn’t be any different than going swimming.”

“No!” The strident tone was creeping into his voice again. “It wouldn’t be right!” There was no use arguing with him once he had made up his mind. He was their leader.

The next time they stopped to rest and eat, the sap was raining down on them in great globs, like the waterdrops that announce a summer-thunderstorm. The central stream of sap flowing through the root was now well over their ankles. As soon as they were not quite sopping wet, their clothes stuck to them like suits of adhesive tape. They could move freely only when they were drenched.

“I can’t stand it any longer,” Blossom said, beginning to cry. “I can’t stand it.”

“There now, Miss Anderson. Chin up! Tally-ho! Remember the Titanic!”

“Stand what?” Neil asked.

“These clothes,” she said. And indeed that was a part of what she couldn’t stand.

“Oh, I guess she’s right,” Neil said, as uncomfortable as the others. “It can’t hurt if we just take off our jackets. Hand them to me, and I’ll knot the sleeves together.”

“Good idea!” Orville said. They all handed their jackets to Neil.

“Blossom!” he said. “I didn’t mean you. It isn’t right.” She didn’t say anything. Neil sort of giggled. “Well, if that’s the way you want it,” he said.

The stuff gushed from the small opening above as from a burst water main. Quite properly, it could not be called sap. It was more like water. For a while they were happy because it cleaned them off. But it was cold, too cold.

The roots, as they ascended through them, had been growing smaller instead of larger. To get through them now they had to crawl on hands and knees, and even so they could scrape their heads on the ceiling if they weren’t careful. The water was up to their elbows.

“I think,” Orville said cautiously, “that we’re coming up underneath Lake Superior. This much water can’t be coming from spring thaws.” He waited for Neil to protest. Then, still more cautiously: “I think we’ll have to go back the way we came. Let’s hope we have better luck a second time.”

The reason Neil had not protested was that he had not heard. Orville’s voice had been drowned out by the roar of the water, which acres and acres of thirsty Plants were siphoning from the lake bottom. Orville explained his theory several times over when they had backed off to a quieter spot. Then Blossom tried.

“Neil, look, it’s very simple—the only way away from the lake is down. Because if we try to move along at this level, we can as easily be going east—farther on into the lake—as west—away from it. If we had the lamp, we could use your compass, but we don’t have the lamp. We might just go along north or south and follow the shore. There’s no telling how much area beneath the lake Daddy explored last winter. We just have to go down. Do you understand?”

Orville took advantage of this occasion to have some private words with Buddy: “What the hell—let’s leave him here if he doesn’t want to go with us. It’ll be his own fault if he drowns.”

“No,” said Buddy, “that wouldn’t be right. I want to do this by the book.”

“Okay, I’ll go,” Neil told Blossom, “but I think it’s a lot of hooey. I’m only agreeing for your sake. Remember that.”

Down: the sap was in spate. It jostled their bodies together or tore them apart as casually as floodwaters bearing off the trees of the riverbank. Strong currents dashed them against the walls of the root wherever the curves were too sharp or too steep. Days of climbing were retraced in minutes.

Deeper down: the stream became less chill, grew thicker, like pudding coming to a boil. But its pace did not slacken. It was like going down a ski trail on a piece of cardboard. At least they need not worry about repeating their mistake: it was no longer possible to move “upstream” toward the lake.

At this depth there were now whole stretches where the hot sap filled the entire hollow of the root. Hoarding a lungful of air, Orville (who was the first to test any new passage) followed the current resistlessly and hoped. There had always been some branch root feeding into the flooded root from above, too small to ascend through perhaps but large enough to butt one’s head into for a breath of air. But the next time, of course, there might not be such an opening. There might only be a dead end.

That fear—that the current was leading them down a blind alley—absorbed their whole attention. More and more often their bodies were swept into entangling networks of the sap-swollen capillaries that lined the unexplored passages. Once Orville was caught in such a net where the root had split abruptly in two. Buddy and Blossom, next behind, found him there, his legs moving only as the current moved them. His head had struck against the hard wedge separating the two branches of the root. He was unconscious, perhaps drowned.

They hauled at his pants leg, and his pants slid right off his narrow hips. Then they each took a foot and pulled him out. A short distance away they found an area where the root, sloping gently upward, was only half-filled with sap. Buddy embraced Orville in a bear hug and began squeezing the water out of his lungs rhythmically. Then Blossom tried mouth-to-mouth respiration, which she’d learned in Red Cross swimming classes.

“What are you doing?” Neil asked. Unfamiliar sounds made him nervous.

“She’s giving Orville artificial respiration,” Buddy answered testily. “He half-drowned back there.”

Neil reached out fingers to confirm this. The fingers came between Orville’s mouth and Blossom’s, then clamped down tightly over Orville’s. “You’re kissing him!”

“Neil!” Blossom screamed. She tried to tear away her brother’s fingers, but even desperation did not lend her sufficient strength. One can only be desperate so long, and she’d passed that limit long ago. “You’ll kill him!”

Buddy struck a blow in the direction he supposed Neil to be, but it glanced off Orville’s shoulder. Neil began to drag Orville’s body away.

“He doesn’t have pants on either,” Neil fretted.

“They came off when we were pulling him out. We told you that, remember?”

The sudden deprivation of oxygen, coming after their efforts at revival, proved to be exactly the stimulus Orville required—he came to.

When the body he was carrying began to stir, Neil let go abruptly, spooked. He had thought Orville was dead, or very nearly.

Buddy and Neil then had a long debate on the propriety of nudity (both in the particular case of Orville and in general) under the present, exceptional circumstances. The argument was mainly a pretext on Buddy’s part to give Orville a chance to regain his strength. “Do you want to get back to the surface,” Buddy asked, “or do you want to stay down here and be drowned?”

“No!” Neil said, yet once more. “It isn’t right. No!”

“You’ve got to choose. Which is it?” Buddy was pleased to discover that he could play on Neil’s fears as easily as on a harmonica. “Because if we’re going to go up, we’ll have to go up together, and we’ll need some kind of rope.”

“We had a rope.”

“And you lost it, Neil.”

“I didn’t. I did not. I—”

“Well, you were the last one who had a hold on it, and now it’s gone. Now we need another rope. Of course, if you don’t care about getting back…. Or if you think you’ll do better on your own…”

Eventually Neil agreed. “But Blossom ain’t going to touch him, understand? She’s my sister, and I ain’t going to have it. Understand?”

“Neil, you don’t have to worry about anything of that sort till we’re all home safe,” Buddy temporized. “Nobody’s going to—”

“And they better not speak to each other either. Cause I say so, and what I say goes. Blossom, you go on ahead of me, and Buddy behind. Orville goes last.”

Neil, naked now except for belt and holster, knotted the legs of their several trousers together, and they set off, each with a grip on the line. The water was deep and so hot their skin seemed to be coming off their bones, like a chicken that boils too long. The current was weakening, however, and they moved more slowly.

Soon they had found a root angling upward from which the trickle of water was not much worse than when they’d first noticed it—how many days ago? Wearily, almost mechanically, they began to climb again.

Blossom remembered a song from nursery school days about a spider washed down a water spout by the rain:

She began to laugh, as she had laughed at the strange words of Jeremiah’s poem, but this time she couldn’t stop laughing, despite how much the laughter hurt.

Of them all, Buddy was the most upset by this, for he could remember the winter before, in the commonroom, and the people who had run out into the thawing snow, laughing and singing, never to return. Blossom’s laughter was not unlike theirs.

The root at this point opened onto a tuber of fruit, and they decided to rest and eat. Orville tried to calm Blossom, but Neil told him to shut up. The pulp, which was now semiliquid, dropped down on their heads and shoulders like the droppings of huge, diarrhetic birds.

Neil was torn between his desire to go away where the noise of his sister’s laughter wouldn’t disturb him and an equally strong desire to stay close at hand and protect her. He compromised, removing to a middle distance, where he lay on his back, not intending to go to sleep, just to rest his body…

His head came down on the handle of the axe that Jeremiah had dropped there. He let out a little cry, which nobody noticed. They were all of them so tired. He sat for a long time, thinking very hard, his eyes crossing with the effort, though you couldn’t see anything in that uncompromising dark.

The softened fruit pulp continued to fall from overhead and spatter on their bodies and on the floor with little crepitant sounds, like the sounds of children’s kisses.