"We can't carry him far," Lenny says.
"It's not far," Buddy says, and he tells Parson, "You best leave, before someone's looking for us."
Parson stands and listens. It has begun to rain gently, as though the shadow of a watery hand draws closer. He hears rain on leaves, a sound like a sigh all around the water, and far off he hears singing in faulty patches. The others are still at the campfire but they'll stop now, in the rain.
He looks at Lenny, doesn't speak, but she says, soft and deliberate, "You should go."
Parson takes a step back, away from them, watches Lenny take Carmody's hand, no, his wrist. The younger ones position themselves at his feet.
"Cap," Lenny says, "help us."
The other girl seems to rouse. She drops the rock she's holding, looks at Lenny. Their exchanged glance seems to pull her in, closer, until she too reaches for one of Carmody's wrists.
"Do it fast," Parson says. He knows they've got to do it now, together, and he remembers the bag of his clothes, his boots. He grabs the sack where it sits, near the rock. A curtain of rain begins to fall quietly across Turtle Hole and Parson is turning, walking. He thinks it will rain all night; he'll put on his clothes when he gets into the trees near the road. Soon it will rain hard and no one will wonder that he's soaked to the skin; men driving between towns on a wet weekend night will stop for him. In fact, they will: as a green Ford Fairlane shudders its way over Mud River Bridge near Gaither, he'll shut his eyes in the dark, whispering to himself in the back seat where no one hears him over the blare of the radio. And he will still see the girls, dragging the body around the diving rock, the body a spent slab they don't try to lift.
The rocky path to the diving rock is a broken road, a road that never was, and the grassy, weed-choked border of the path, the dense, leafy woods beyond, are suddenly full of sound. The rain is just beginning, a fine spray, a drift of cloud. Insects chorus in the clarified air, in the safety of the dark. Hundreds of crickets, Buddy thinks, more, maybe thousands, what are thousands, and he sees numbers in his mind, a one with endless zeros, points beyond points, and the crickets and beetles are small as zeros, darting hidden, hard as jewels, deep down near the white roots of the onion grass. He feels himself move among them, tall as a mountain. The girls follow him, tight together, and a blight elation stabs through him; the world has turned round and made real a scenario too surprising to have dreamed or hoped. They're like a team in the dark, a team in a group in a line,
trooping all together,
and for a moment he forgets what the girls
hold in their hands, why they're struggling to keep up, their breathing a ragged, balanced cadence urging him on, pressing against him, their staggered footfalls moving him. And the dragging sound between them moves him too: the heavy thing they pull along the ground, the wound that hangs down, and Buddy's head goes black inside. At the edge of his darkness a bright thread jumps like a nerve, moving off into a separate space Buddy can't think about with what he knows. If he were really a mountain, the girls would be part of the dark, all four of them on the path with their cargo, unseen from way up high. Nothing lit from far away but the stranger who has left them and moved off, his trail a line of light through trees toward the road. He has to be moving, careful, in the cover of the trees, Buddy thinks, or stopped like a still point, standing on the road shirtless with his wet trousers clung to his legs. Or he could wait in the woods until real night comes, wait to leave, and far off on a road the car or truck that will pick him up is already moving toward him. Sound of an engine. The stranger will walk through trees to the road, and Buddy knows he'll come out two curves and a straight piece from the dirt turnoff that leads to Camp Shelter. Leads past the church with blue windows and farther on to Buddy's house. The car that picks up the stranger could head back past Shelter Road, past the wide berm where Buddy and Mam stand when they wait for the bus, on toward Bellington and across the whole country of America. That's where the road goes if you never stop, Mam says, clear to the Pacific Ocean, and Buddy thinks about the stranger plunging into the sea, not a man anymore but a long tail of light, like the comets he's seen in pictures at school. Or the stranger could head the other way, over Mud River Bridge into Gaither and quickly through it, like a thought going away from them, vanishing. There's an ocean on that side too, Mam says so, not so far either, a big cold ocean, and Buddy sees the stranger taking away everything that's happened, taking it all away into water so big and deep nothing ever comes out again. Buddy fixes the stranger in his mind, the way he looked, arched high out of the water of Turtle Hole and bearing down on Dad, suspended, come from nowhere: Buddy holds him still and looks at him. He did look winged, bronzed and dark, his big shoulders and the whole of his body curved, flared inward, an attack bird, a sprung predator poised to drop, and Buddy remembers a pounding, his heartbeat in his ears when he was pushed under the water, nowhere to go but deeper, the thrashing above him a flailing mix of limbs and white streaks. How big the water was, how cold as he went deeper, with the dappled gold color like circles inside circles, spangling the bottom that sank farther away as Buddy drifted toward it.
"I hear something," a voice says behind him, and the procession slows, hesitates.
Behind, in front of them, the sound reverberates in the rain, fragile, a breathy calling that hangs in the air.
"Alma, it's just doves, or owls," Lenny says quietly, "owls in the trees."
"In the trees," Buddy hears himself say, like an echo.
"Don't stop walking," Lenny whispers back. "It will be too hard to keep going."
"Where is he taking us?" Alma asks her.
Buddy doesn't turn to look but he says, still moving, "This way, around the rock. I know a hiding place."
And he hears them fall in again, resume their march. He thinks about them marching and lifts his own knees higher, walking, not running, a troop is a team that walks:
airy mountain,
and the ground does rise here, toward the back of the diving rock, the door of the cave, the slant of shelf-like hole that opens, and Buddy feels a rush of fear, a tremor along his spine so chill he can't be drowsy, but he stifles a yawn that makes him shake. A little sound escapes him.
Lenny reaches out, puts a hand on his shoulder. "Shhh," she says, "quick now."
"Lenny," Cap says, "did he hurt you?"
Buddy knows her, the girl Lenny stays with in her tent. Cap. A name like a hat.
Lenny whispers, "Don't talk about it now."
"We can't ever talk about it," Cap says.
"We can talk," Lenny says, "but only to each other. It's only ours to talk about. We're the only ones who were there. We're the only ones who know what happened."
One of the girls is crying, on and on.
"We'll talk later," Lenny says, "not now."
"Delia," someone says, "shhh, shhh."
"Never mind, Alma," Lenny says.
"Delia, some of us could have run away," Alma says quietly. "But we couldn't leave Lenny. We couldn't leave Lenny, Delia."
"I know," Delia sobs, softly.
"Let Delia be," Lenny says. "She's all right."
Buddy turns to look. Lenny and Cap are barely able to drag Dad over the ground. The younger girls seem far away, holding his ankles up, as though they only keep him from taking root in his heavy parts, melding into ground like a fallen tree gone powdery and rotten. But Dad is not rotten; he's someone asleep, with no face. His hooded head hangs down and his white chest is like a face. His bare back scrapes along the dirt. Buddy doesn't look, he doesn't look at Dad's long legs or think about Dad's belt. The belt with the buckle will stay in the cave, the buckle like a treasure that won't change, metal like a coin: Buddy knows about coins, how they last and never rot. Like animals rot on the loamy ground of the forest, like Dad will rot, all of him gone away to powder. Not big anymore, not fast, in front of Buddy and behind him and all over him. Buddy takes a skip, jumps in place, like he could help them lift, but he can't touch, no: Dad is too heavy for him. Buddy has the light though, he has the light, not Dad, and he'll turn it on when they get to the cave. Now he shows them how to go, here, around the back of the rock that anchors sheer above them. They can still see to follow, this dark is not really dark at all. Buddy knows about the real dark, the black inside the cave. Now he sees the back of the rock, the little rise of dirt leading to the hole. The scrub pine around the hole moves, pale, showing its underside; there's a wind picking up, a soft rainy wind to blow leaves and needles backwards. The pine tosses itself gently against the rock. Buddy grasps the damp, springy tendrils with his hands, pulls himself close, and kneels at the hole.
She's there beside him.
"It's a cave," Buddy tells her, "a big cave deep in."
She watches as he turns the flashlight on, shines it quickly inside. "You go in first," she says, "and hold the light on us."
Buddy can smell the cave breathing its cool air into the rain, like a smoke no one can see. He crouches and crawls in; he doesn't look to the right or left, only turns back around and plays the light across Lenny, across the space where she'll appear. He sees her hands, her arms, reach through, and her hair hides her face. She pulls herself in tighter than she needs to, crawling through like the opening is smaller than it really is. When Dad came through he only crouched down double, but Dad could move like an animal, bending and sliding and folding himself. Buddy yawns again, shivering, then Lenny is beside him on all fours, and she touches his arm to signal he should shift the beam of light. He hears her panting, and she reaches through the hole to motion Cap inside.
Buddy sees her hands on Cap's hands. He moves to make more room and Cap is inside. Both of them lean back through the opening into the bluer night. Buddy can taste the night in his mouth like a wish, a night so big, so warm and wet and full of air, falling away forever like the sky falls with its stars.
"Give us the hands," Lenny says, "here."
Buddy sees Dad's hands reach in, the fingers splayed, and he stumbles backwards. Dad would crawl in out of the rain, he'd do it like that, long, on his belly, out of nowhere—like his foot, his leather boot, had appeared beside Buddy's hand when Buddy got out of the cave. But Lenny and Cap take hold of Dad's wrists, and they have to pull so hard, like Dad doesn't want to be here anymore, he wouldn't go out, he won't come in, they have to pull so hard their hands slip and they grasp his fingers, holding on.
Buddy shines the light. Dad's hands look like anyone else's now. They don't look like Dad's hands anymore.
"You have to push," Buddy hears Cap say through the hole. "Inside there's a slant downward, but you have to push to get him in. Hold his legs and push."
And Dad's covered head is inside, wobbling, and his white shoulders. And his blank white chest. Then the rest of him slides down the incline of the rock, slides so fast he reaches darkness, and the faces of the other girls appear, lit and golden, in the rectangular frame of the hole.
"Come on," Lenny says, "hurry." And she reaches out to them. Alma slides inside and walks the slant of rock to stand near them.
"I don't want to," comes Delia's voice. "I can't."
Lenny stands at the slanted hole of the entrance. Buddy thinks she's talking to the whole world outside the opening. "You were brave, Delia," she says softly. "You kept him from hurting me."
"I was scared," Delia sobs angrily.
"I was scared too," Alma says. "But we stayed together—"
"We weren't wrong, Delia," Cap tells her. "There was no one to help us."
"Wait," Lenny says. "Delia, do you want to go back to camp and get someone? If you do, tell us now. We'll come with you. All of us."
There's a pause. No, Buddy wants to tell them. No, don't bring anyone, don't tell.
"Delia," Lenny calls quietly. "We can't make it so that it never happened. But we can make it stop here, and stay here. We can, Delia."
"I don't want anyone to make me talk about it," Alma says, almost absently. "I want to think about it ourselves, just us."
Delia's face peers through the rock slash of the opening. One long beam of light trained on the stone ceiling casts a glowy nimbus around her. Buddy knows she sees through to find them in the dark soup beneath her, all of them shadows. She shouts into the cave, where the sound disappears. "What if one of us tells," she cries, her voice breaking.
"Delia—" Cap begins.
"No, wait," Lenny says, "she's right. Any one of us might tell..." She is quiet a moment, then starts again, seeming to find words as she talks. "Tell someone, sometime ... Tomorrow, or next year, or in twenty years."
"A hundred years," Alma breathes, as though it's a fairy tale.
"And what then?" Cap says.
"Then maybe we'll all talk about it." Lenny stands quite still.
"We'll have to," Cap says.
Alma steps closer, floats her clear voice up to Delia. "Or one of us might tell someone," she says, "who'll never tell."
Everyone stops speaking. Buddy waits in the silence, hearing the water rattle deep in, deeper than any of them knows. He thinks the cave could go so deep it holds all of Turtle Hole, holds the bowl of the water in vast rocks and deep spreads of space that crawl down and down beneath Camp Shelter.
"Delia," Lenny says softly, "what do you want to do?"
"I want to come in," says Delia's voice.
Buddy shines the light on the opening. And Lenny reaches up to help Delia through, guiding her legs, nearly lifting her inside. Buddy plays the light around the dome of the entrance, follows the curve of the rock just over their heads. He lets the glow fall to hold their faces, their white collars and shoulders. Gravely, they look into nothing, relieved, afraid, completely still. Buddy hears them breathing, and he can't swallow, or think what it is he has to do.
"We should have some twine, some string," Cap says, "to find our way out again."