Marcus shuts off the three-wheeler and slides off the seat. He offers me his arm. “You don’t look too peachy.”
“I’m okay.” I lock my knees, just in case.
The air has turned bitter. The cold makes my ears ache. Large, dark clouds have pulled together, and the wind carries in it menace. A wind like this—the latches on storm cellars should be ringing clear as church bells. Instead, there is an eerie quiet.
Marcus is sweating a great deal and doing a very poor imitation of keeping calm. He doesn’t need to tell us twice to hurry.
The ground is rocky. Marcus lifts a flap on the chain-link fence and puts his hand on Adam’s head as he crouches through the gap. On the other side, we scuttle down the sandy embankment and come to a smooth concrete pathway. It leads to two round entrances, like gaping mouths. I am both eager to find shelter and afraid to take another step. Above the entrance is a painting that looks like stained glass of a robed creature with long hair and outstretched arms. Trailing from her hands are stars.
“Our guardian angel,” Marcus explains.
“What’s in there?” Adam has heard it, too.
“We’ll get to that later.”
The curtain falls back into place. Marcus tells us we can now relax, leaving me to wonder how so flimsy a net is supposed to deter bad guys. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small flashlight. A familiar dread rises up in me. I tell myself this hole in the ground will be different. There is no door, for one. I have my son with me, and a friend. I have a dog that knows how to rip out a man’s throat.
We proceed deeper into the tunnel. The beam of light instills the same confidence that caulking on a crack in a dam wall would.
“Bet you never imagined you and me would have anything in common. See, I’ve lived underground for years, too.” Marcus leans toward Adam. “You aren’t afraid of spiders, are you? Get them as big as your hand in here.” Marcus uses the flashlight to scan the ceiling and the walls, and what pops out are colorful pictures painted in the same style as the angel at the entrance. Adam stops to examine the naked-lady picture.
“Nikon mostly practices in this tunnel. His best work is in the other one. To me, they’re pretty pictures, but he says everything means something.”
I startle when the thunder booms. “Isn’t this a storm drain?”
Marcus has us keep walking. “I know what you’re thinking—soon as those clouds start dumping water, we best have snorkels. Fifteen years ago, you’d have been right. When we first started living down here, we’d get washed out every other week. Now, we got those gutters at street level plugged up tight, let me tell you. It rains, and a river as big as the Missouri runs down Mass Street, but we stay bone-dry.”
The air is moist, almost thick enough to swill and spit out. Beyond the light is nothing but the cloying void, at least that’s what I think until the dog breaks rank and growls. His ears are flattened against his head,
and the sole tuft of hair on his neck is raised in a spiky ridge. Another dog, one that looks like it’s been stitched together from patchwork squares, stares at us from the scrap of light.
Marcus calls out, “How you doing, Lexie?”
The two dogs circle each other, exchange smells. The patchwork dog approaches Marcus, sniffs his shoes and pants, and sits up on its back paws.
“What makes you think I have something to eat?” He pets the dog’s grotesque head and tells us Lexie’s a friend, then rustles around in his pack and comes out with a wedge of cheese. He hands the dog a piece and then turns around and gives some to Oracle, too.
“She don’t bite,” Marcus says, when the mongrel begs off Adam.
Adam digs out the Twinkie and gets a slobbered hand for his troubles.
“Now, stay close,” Marcus whispers. “Lexie’s owner can be a spooky sonofabitch, but he keeps out the riff-raff. No headhunter’s going to come down here with Blade around. He tries talking to you, you just keep your head down. Let me do the talking.”
We’ve not gone a dozen paces farther when a jagged voice rips the darkness. The sound is distorted, as though it has traveled through a stretched-out coil. “Abandon all hope!” Coming off the phantom is a foul smell. “Through me you enter into the city of woes!”
I reach for Adam’s hand.
“Blade’s got a thing for Dante,” Marcus whispers, putting a protective arm around me. Obviously got a thing for vinegar, too. The odor burns my nose. Marcus keeps the beam of light focused ahead and not to the side where the voice is hissing more warnings.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!”
“Hey there, Blade. How you doing? We’re making our way to camp; be outta your hair in just a minute.” Because Marcus takes to humming an overly cheerful tune, I worry even more.
“The city of woes!”
“Just passin’ through, Blade; just passin’ through.”
“Abandon all hope!” He’s standing close enough that I can smell his
vile breath. I don’t turn my head, not even when a rawboned hand grazes my shoulder.
“Mom!” Adam whispers, trying to wriggle free of my grasp. I realize I have dug my nails into his palm.
After walking through a maze of tunnels, Marcus steers us through a tight gulch that opens to an antechamber about the size of a bowling alley. A string of bulbs light only part of the space. Groups of people are gathered around fiery drums. One group is singing. Lit by the orange glow, the figures don’t resemble castaway people, vagrants like those at the train, but more like bronze statues come to life.
But for a loincloth, the man in front of us is naked. Stringy white hair hangs in long strands from the sides of his head and chin. Whiskers spring from his nose, and his eyebrows are so overgrown, he has to squint to keep from being poked in the eye. Where his cheeks are supposed to be are deep crevices, and instead of a row of teeth, there is a single incisor sharpened to a point.
“I was wondering when you were going to show up. We got word on the CB. These are your fellow bandits, I take it.”
Adam can’t stop staring at the man. He has grown up being told that people Above don’t live to be old, that they are taken out by radiation or disease or wild animals, but here is one surely as ancient as God.
“Adam, Blythe, I’d like you to meet Pops.”
The old man shakes my hand and peers at Adam. “Adam, huh? So you’re the one causing all the fuss?”
I wink at Adam, but he looks at his feet.
Marcus comments on the singing, which is now even louder and not exactly on key, and Pops explains that we have arrived during rehearsals and that it is going to be a madhouse until opening night of the musical.
The Wizard of Oz
, we are told. To me and Adam he gives this warning: “Unless you want to be put in a ridiculous outfit, I suggest you tell the director in unequivocal terms when he comes and pesters you to audition that you are not interested in a part.”
Pops makes shooing gestures. “Stark-raving mad, the lot of them, and he’s the ringleader.” To Marcus, he asks, “Are we to assume your guests will be staying awhile?”
As Marcus pulls Pops into a tight huddle off to the side, I nudge Adam. “You okay?”
“I didn’t mean to cause ‘a fuss.’ ”
“The man was teasing, Adam.” How to explain teasing?
“Above is not how I thought it would be.”
If he’d let me, I’d take him in my arms and hug him.
When you’ve lived your whole life with elaborate fantasies, how can reality stand a chance? You think if only you can see with your own two eyes, taste with your own lips, you will know the truth. You think if you can kiss the soil and breathe the fresh air, you’ll be free. Freedom has always been a matter of getting out, of being Above. And here we are, discovering what a flash in the pan it can be.
“If it weren’t for me,” Adam continues, “you wouldn’t be in all this trouble.”
I take a breath. I hold him by the shoulders so he knows that what’s coming is big. “If I could go back in time to that moment when Dobbs stopped the car where I was walking, do you know what I would do? Do you? I’d get in. I’d go through it all over again just so I could have you.”
I make him say okay before I let him go.
“Marcus is going to help build a new city someplace south of here. I want us to go with him.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to go to Eudora. I want to go where the people are.”
It would have been better if my son punched me in the gut. I am the people, I want to scream. If I could breathe.
“Your mom and dad aren’t there. Nobody’s there, Mom.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Mom, the odds are—”
“You know nothing about odds, Adam. Nothing!”
I sit down hard.
Marcus announces that he is going to sort out a place for us to sleep. Not until he walks toward the far wall do I notice a long row of tents and lean-tos.
“Marcus has shared a little of your and Adam’s remarkable history. The world must appear very different from what you imagined; disappointing, I daresay.”
Adam bends to pet his dog. I suspect it is to keep from showing just how disappointed he is.
“You must know the allegory of Plato’s cave?” Pops asks.
I shake my head.
He looks like a hobo, but he talks like someone with an education, like he might have been somebody important before. He tells the story of people chained since infancy by their hands and necks in a cave. Rather than facing the light from the entrance, they have been forced to spend their lives watching shadows on the dark wall in front of them, unaware that the images are cast by puppeteers behind them. A prisoner who is released from the cave ventures outside only to find he has great trouble believing the objects he finds there are more real than the illusions they cast on the cave wall.
“According to Plato, the released captive will at first see only the shadows best, then the reflections of objects in the water, and then, as he adjusts, the objects themselves. Eventually, he will see himself as he truly is and will discover his proper place in the world.” He gestures to our surroundings. “If we rely only on our senses, what we see can imprison us. To Plato, in order to be free, one must journey above to the realm of knowledge, where we must strain our eyes for what is last to appear.”
“What is last to appear?” Adam asks as two plates hover toward us.
Pops is obviously pleased to be asked. “The idea of good. When we
behold the idea of good, Plato teaches, then all that is right and beautiful is possible.”
Adam looks up to see his plate being offered by a girl, a girl with huge brown eyes, a wide smile and wheat-colored hair woven into many long braids. Talk about right and beautiful, is his expression.
“Chili?” she says. “It’s really good.”
He’s seen pictures. Dobbs once brought down a magazine of women without clothes, and men, too, with their whatsits out. I could have scalped him when I found it in Adam’s room. Here now is a real girl—a young woman, actually. Nothing at all like a shadow or a picture. Yet, she is every bit as pretty as make-believe.
Adam takes the plate and watches the girl with the same kind of blinkered concentration usually set aside for mechanical devices as she walks to a row of tables and pours water from a pitcher. When she brings him the glass, you’d think she was showing him how to split atoms.
“My name’s Bea—not in the buzz-buzz kind, but short for Beatrice. But nobody calls me Beatrice.” There’s a musical lilt to the way she speaks.
Adam has yet to take a bite of food.
She upends a bucket and sits next to him, fluffing out a skirt that seems to be made out of neckties. Her shirt appears to be woven out of shoelaces. “Pete’s a really good cook; you should try it.” She points to Adam’s plate and lifts an invisible spoon to her mouth.
Adam takes a mouthful.
Bea nods and smiles. “Your dog friendly?” She bends to pet Oracle’s head. I have the urge to tell her not to get too close, that the dog has a thing for throats. It’s Adam I’m mad at, but she’s to blame, too. She and all the other Outsiders who are exerting their collective pull on my son, people who are not my people.
“I like dogs. Birds, too. I had a crow for a while. It could sing. We like to sing around here. Are those real binoculars?” Adam takes them off and lets her look through them. She points them straight at him and giggles, and I wonder if the girl is not a bit loopy. After giving them back, she flits over to a basket and comes back with two sticks crossed
together at the middle. She weaves yarn around them. “You’re not one for talking, are you? It’s okay. Ask anyone here and they’ll tell you I talk enough for everyone put together. Except for Pops, maybe.” For a brief moment, we all look at the old man, who holds up his hands as if to say, Guilty as charged.
“It’s just that there’s so much to talk about,” Bea continues. “You put words to your life and tell it like a story, and,
ta-da!
you’re a main character. Now, people say there are things that shouldn’t be spoken of—bad things. But I think those ought to be spoken of first. Get them out of the way. Make room for all the good things, don’t you think?”
Does she have an
OFF
button?
Her handiwork produces an intricate pattern of greens, reds, and yellows. She tells him it’s called a God’s eye.
“My mom likes crafts,” Adam finally manages.
Yes, she’s especially good with a crochet needle.
The girl looks over at me as though I just materialized. “Oh, hello.”
“Hello.”
Returning, Marcus claps Adam on the shoulder. “You and your mom can have my tent. I’m going to room with my buddy, Dyno. Remember, I told you about him? He’s still got a Buick from his dealership days, near-mint condition, too. Maybe tomorrow we’ll go take a look at it.”
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” I pull Marcus out of earshot. “You need to make it clear to Adam that we are not to come with you to wherever it is you’re planning on going.”
“Osage Indian Reservation, Oklahoma. In a few years, there’s going to be a city out there.”
“We’re going to Eudora. First there, and then we’ll see.”
“I hear you.”
I look over at Adam and the girl, at the old man who speaks of shadows and ideas. “How long do we have to stay here?”
“Pops pretty much stays glued to the CB. As soon as we know interest has petered out, we’ll get you home. Couple, three days is all. Any longer than that, a headhunter’s going to think you’ve been snapped up by someone else or else, joined a caravan or . . . you know . . .”