Going Where It's Dark

“No.”

  “Okay.”

  Buck went outside, picked up a hoe, and tramped to the back of the garden.

  Today, not even weeding carrots could dampen his excitement. Not even a phone humiliation. He dropped clumps of weeds into a bucket without even thinking about the scrapes and blisters on his hands from all that rock crawling. Man, what he had to tell David! And only David.

  •••

  Except for Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Andersons ate their meals in the kitchen. No one had an official seat at the large, rectangular table, except for Gramps at one end, Dad at the other. Mom and Joel, Buck and Katie sat in varied arrangements on either side, and Mel pulled up a stray chair wherever he could find a spot when he was home. Katie’s main job was to start dinner, following whatever instructions her mom had left for her that morning—put a casserole in the oven, boil some potatoes, make a salad….

  Tonight it was spareribs, and nineteen-year-old Joel was in a good mood because it was Saturday and he’d be meeting up with his buddies later. No matter how much he ate, he still remained the tall, slim young man with a slight bump on his nose where a baseball had hit it when he was nine. He had a smile that turned one side of his mouth up a fraction, the other side down, and he was smiling now.

  “Had a pencil tucked under two fingers when I measured a board for Mrs. Ebert today,” he said, grinning down at the red-skinned potatoes he’d just heaped on his plate. “She says, ‘Joel! What happened to your hand?’—she can’t see worth a hoot—and I say, just as quick, ‘Lost a couple fingers to the saw last week,’ and she pret’ near’ died.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “So that’s what all that screechin’ was about,” said Gramps. His shaky hands made the wooden fork he was holding vibrate against the rim of the salad bowl. He fished out a couple of snap peas and passed it on.

  “Oh, she’s a good sport. And she’s teased me plenty when I was little,” Joel said.

  “She told me I was pretty once,” said Katie, her saucy eyes daring her brothers to contradict her.

  “Well, you are, but pretty on the inside is what’s important,” said Mom. A short, sturdy woman, Doris Anderson was still wearing her green and gray Holly’s Homestyle uniform, and after she buttered a roll, she turned her attention to Buck. “What did you do today, Buck? Saw your sneakers there on the back porch. Looked like you’d been through a swamp.”

  His sneakers! He’d forgotten about those. “J-just riding around,” Buck answered.

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah. Wish D…D…David was here.”

  Without looking up from his plate, Dad said, “Good chance to make friends with some other boys.”

  “Way out here?” Buck said.

  Dad’s voice was as deep as he was big. He and Mom made quite a pair, because she was five foot two and he was six foot one. “You got a new bike, and you ride all over the county. Not like I work you to death.”

  That was true, and they’d lived here all Buck’s life. Not like he was new in town either. But David was easy. With David he could talk or not talk. If he stuttered on a word, David didn’t get antsy. Didn’t jump in and say it for him.

  Gramps, though, had turned the conversation to the sawmill. “Think sometimes I should’ve gone into the plywood business. Can’t hardly keep it in stock. Used to be we could make a living out of the wood we cut. Now we’ve got to sell plywood too, and I don’t know what-all.”

  Buck gratefully reached for his iced tea. His grandfather had the typical Anderson face—narrow, with an especially long distance between the nose and upper lip. “A horse face,” he’d once said of himself. But a gentle horse, Buck thought. There were lines on both sides of his mouth, so deep they’d hold a penny, Buck figured.

  Mom and Katie, with their round faces and puffed cheeks, were the exception, but everyone shared at least a few characteristics with the others—smile or hair pattern or the way they laughed.

  So how was it that out of the six members of this family—seven if you counted Uncle Mel, twenty-three if you counted Grandma, who was gone, and all of Buck’s assorted aunts and uncles and cousins—he was the only one who stuttered? For the rest of the family, talking was as natural as breathing.

  “How hard is it to just open your danged mouth and get the word out?” Dad had asked Buck once in exasperation.

  Harder than anyone knows, Buck had thought.

  •••

  He had texted David right after dinner and was waiting for him to answer. Now he sat on the edge of his bed, trying to stop the jitters in his chest. He felt like he had the day he and David jumped over a four-foot gap in the rocks with a twenty-foot drop below. The same way his heart was thumping when he balanced his way across Hazard Creek on a poplar that had fallen over in a storm.

  How could everything in his room look so ordinary when he felt so different inside? The small red radio on the top of his bookcase was the same; the catcher’s mitt and the photo of him and Gramps holding a string of fish. The racing car model, the football helmet Uncle Mel had worn back in the eighties, and the National Geographic poster of mountain climbers next to the window. His excitement dimmed a little as his eyes scanned the Baltimore Ravens calendar above the dresser, because it was almost summer, and his goal had been to stop stuttering by his last semester of middle school. That was only one year off, and he wasn’t even close.

  But that was beside the point at the moment. He had to plan. Carefully. The right time. The right stuff. His eyes traveled back to the football helmet Mel had given him as a souvenir of his quarterback days in high school. He wished he had a caving helmet with a headlamp, but he didn’t. For now his bicycle helmet and flashlight would have to do.

  Okay. What else? Professional cavers were equipped with rope, duct tape, electrical tape, knives, headlamps, flashlights, wet suits, gloves, canteen, knee pads, elbow pads, matches, goggles….He sure could have used a headlamp when he was down there today, and wondered how much they cost. Dad was going to pay him a dollar a row to keep the garden weeded, and each row reached from the edge of the backyard to the creek. It might take all summer before he could afford one.

  Buck opened his notebook and started a list.

  •••

  What was taking David so long? When he hadn’t immediately responded to Buck’s text, Buck had simply thumbed in the words NEWS! r u there? and waited. After the Weinsteins had moved away, Uncle Mel gave Buck his old cell phone, and the boys usually texted at least once a week. Sometimes once a day.

  Buck didn’t like to admit it, but he worried sometimes that David had made a new friend—someone who was taking up time David could have been using to text him. It wasn’t that he wanted David to remain friendless. And he knew that David’s mom was filling his life as full as possible to make up for yanking the boys apart when she got a job transfer. It was just that Buck had had more fun with David than any friend he’d ever had.

  He rarely spoke to him on the phone, though. Never spoke to anyone by phone if he could help it. The minute he tried to speak, his vocal cords went into spasms of paralysis, and every word was a struggle. When Buck had to carry on a phone conversation, he could sense his jaws tightening, his teeth clenching, his lips quivering. Sometimes at school, especially if he had to speak in front of the class, he could feel his face and neck burn. He would blink repeatedly, and his mouth and lips felt as though they were cast in concrete.

  “Stupid freak,” Ethan had called him once.

  But now, sitting on the floor of his room, his back against the bed, Buck could punch in the letters faster than he could talk, and tonight Buck willed his cell phone to buzz. Tonight, he’d even try talking if he had to.

  David always had the most to say, even with thumbs. How he hated his new school but liked their apartment; that they were buying a dog; that he’d just seen The Man Without a Face; that his mom’s boss was a dork.

  Even when they’d been together, it was David who talked the most, and when Buck stu
ttered a reply, David waited him out. Sometimes, if he asked a question and it was taking Buck more time than usual to answer, David would say, “One…one thousand, two…one thousand…,” and they’d both laugh. That was as far as it went. In the two years they’d been friends, David had never once asked Buck about his stuttering. David jiggled one knee when he talked; Buck stuttered. That was just the way they were.

  His cell phone buzzed and Buck texted in seconds: yo!

  hey dude u must have been sitting on it whuzzup?

  u won’t believe

  what? WHAT????

  i found something. a hole. and i went in

  alone? how far?

  And then…slowly…sentence by sentence, Buck told him about the Hole. About sticking his head in as far as it would go and shining the flashlight, climbing down about eight feet, then crawling, sliding, following the draft, and wriggling to where the passage made the first turn.

  And every so often David interrupted with a u got to b kidding!

  When Buck finished at last and gave his thumbs a rest, there was no reply for some time. Then David’s words on the screen,

  is this 4 real?

  And Buck answered, it’s real.

  •••

  The question they kept coming back to was whether Buck should be going in there alone. Discussion was pointless because they both knew that, number one, he shouldn’t, and number two, he would.

  He had to. Someone else might discover the Hole if he didn’t explore it first. What if that dip in the earth he’d come to meant that water erosion was the beginning of a sinkhole? What if the ground just collapsed someday, and when the Wilmer place was sold and the property surveyed, the new owners could walk right into a cave, no exploring necessary?

  Or what about “the Pit,” an underground chamber out near an old quarry? The police had found some college kids partying in it a month or two ago. Before anyone could explore it, the county declared it unsafe and boarded it up, with a space for bats to go in and out, Buck had heard, until they could put a metal grill over it. They might do the same to the Hole if they found it.

  Was it too much to want to discover something? Buck wondered, keeping this particular thought to himself. They didn’t have to name a cave after him. It didn’t have to make him famous. All he wanted was to be the one who found it. How many places were left on earth where no one else had ever been? Oh, yeah, mountains and the ocean floor, but somewhere he had a chance to get to, he meant. And he’d never had a chance to go far.

  Their discussion had even made David nervous, though.

  r u sure u can find it again? he asked.

  Of course, Buck told him. It was either the second or third outcropping of rock into the meadow, and he had counted off fifty-two paces from the sun-bleached skeleton of a dog or a fox, he wasn’t sure, to the Hole.

  a pile of bones? David had texted back. dude, any animal could come along and carry those off before u got there again

  Embarrassed, Buck punched in, don’t worry i’ll find it

  i’m making notes, David texted.

  Before they signed off, however, he wanted a promise: that when Buck went in the Hole again, he would leave a note in his room that if he didn’t come back, his folks should call David. That only David could tell them where to look.

  And Buck had promised.

  Uncle Mel got back two hours after the family returned from church on Sunday. The big noon meal was over, and Buck sat at the kitchen table eating his second piece of butterscotch pie. Although his uncle usually knew before he started a long-distance trip just how many days it would take, there was always the possibility of mechanical problems with the big semi, or a delay in unloading at a docking station.

  “Well, look who’s just in time to do the dishes,” said Mom when Mel came through the back door. “Should have called and told us to keep a plate warm for you.”

  Her brother grinned as he set his thermos on the counter. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he told her. “I stopped at Holly’s for some fried chicken.”

  “You what?” Mom whirled about. “Ten minutes from home and you stop at a restaurant to eat?”

  Curly-haired Mel broke into laughter.

  “Don’t get your britches in a twist. Naw, I met up with a buddy of mine in Hanover and we had lunch. Even got my truck back on time. I’ll heat up your leftovers for supper. Be just as good then.”

  “Oh, you!” said Mom, and she gave him a swat with the dish towel.

  Buck smiled at his uncle as Mel hung his cap behind the door, where a faded assortment of jackets, raincoats, hoodies, and an apron or two dangled limply on painted white pegs, waiting to be claimed. Except for Mel’s dark curly hair and Mom’s straight, they looked a lot like each other. Both had eyes that squeezed into slits when they laughed, and both were slightly plump in the midsection. Because Mel was divorced and supporting an ex-wife and daughter in Cincinnati, he’d been glad to make his home with his sister and her family. And being a long-distance trucker meant he couldn’t have kept up a house and yard even if he’d had one.

  “How’s everyone here?” he asked. “Been away for five days. Anything exciting happen?”

  Yes! Buck was thinking, but he couldn’t tell it.

  “Not much,” Mom answered. “Garden’s going good. Don and Gramps are watching the Nationals. Go on in.”

  “Naw. The Ford’s acting up. I’m gonna try cleaning the spark plugs. Then I need to look in on Jacob. Like to stay off my fanny for a while, anyway. Grab me a rag, will you, Buck?”

  Buck scraped his fork sideways across the plate to get the last of the butterscotch, then put his plate in the sink, got some old rags from the pantry, and followed his uncle outside. He liked to hang around when Mel worked on his car.

  “N…need any help?” he asked.

  “Not unless you got a batch of new spark plugs for this sucker,” Mel said, and opened the hood of the old green sedan. “So how you doin’?”

  “Doing okay,” Buck said, resting his hands on the side of the car and looking down into the belly of the Ford. More than okay, but he couldn’t say it. He watched as his uncle removed a spark plug, wrapped a rag around it, then stood, twisting it back and forth.

  “Doing anything special this summer?”

  Buck avoided Mel’s eyes. He couldn’t guess, could he? He shrugged.

  Mel inspected the plug in his hand, then glanced over at Buck again. “Got a favor to ask. I know your dad needs help in the garden, with vegetables coming up overnight, almost. I was thinking about something the other day, though, if you’ve got some extra time. It’s another job for you, but the kind you do partly because you want to, not just because you’re getting paid.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, one of our drivers quit last week and another’s going to retire. I’ll be getting some of their cross-country runs, and that means I’ll be on the road a lot more. I’ve been looking in on Jacob Wall a couple times a week. But if I’m going to be gone four and five days at a time, maybe you could look in on him for me when I’m away.”

  Buck tried to remember if he’d ever seen the man who’d moved into the small yellow house halfway between the Andersons and the general store. “What do you m…mean, ‘look in on’?”

  “Take in his mail, see if he needs any groceries, get something off a shelf for him—just see if he’s okay. He’s not an easy man to get along with; doesn’t even want me there half the time. But he needs me—needs someone—and he knows it.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Not sure. Moved in last year. Rheumatoid arthritis or something. Walks like every joint in his body gives him pain. Gets disability checks, Ted Beall told me. The only way he’ll accept help is to give me a five-dollar bill on Fridays. Hands it to me without a word, and I take it without a word. Doesn’t want thanks from anyone, and sure as heck doesn’t want pity.”

  “You d…don’t ever talk to him?”

  “Oh sure, but not much. If you
take over for me when I’m out of town, you can keep the five on Fridays. Any big repairs he needs, I’ll do when I get back.”

  Buck shifted his weight to the other foot. “I d…don’t know….”

  “Well, I don’t either, and I’m not about to make up your mind for you. I’ll get Joel to do it if you can’t.”

  Buck thought about that garden. If he weeded five rows a week, got a five on Fridays…Buy that headlamp sooner than he thought. More than that, though, he didn’t like saying no to Uncle Mel.

  “I’ll g…g…give it a try,” he said.

  “Good.” Mel closed the hood of the car, handed the rag to Buck, then reached in the backseat and grabbed an old pair of overalls rolled up in a bundle. He gave those to Buck as well. “Those can go in the trash. So torn up I’m embarrassed to wear ’em even when I’m changing a tire.”

  No way, Buck thought. No matter if they were four sizes too big; he could cut them down and wear them over his clothes the next time he crawled in the Hole.

  •••

  They walked a half mile down the road to Jacob’s house. Buck was still in his Sunday pants, but had traded his white shirt for a brown tee from Bealls’. Printed on the front were the words Bealls’ Country Store in yellow, with the outline of a rooster beneath.

  Mel bent his elbows and pulled his shoulders back in a giant stretch.

  “Whoo!” he said. “Sure does feel good to walk around. Someday I’ll be trying to get out of that semi and find my butt’s sprouted roots to the seat.”

  Buck laughed. He and his uncle both had the same sort of loping walk. Like Buck, Mel was on the short side, but he was definitely muscular. He might have spent a good part of his week sitting in the cab of a truck, but the hauling of freight on and off when he got to where he was going kept the muscles in his arms and legs as thick as a boxer’s.

  “You like your j…job, though,” Buck reminded him.

  Mel nodded. “Like sitting up high while I drive, seeing the country, the way it changes, south to north and east to west. Like talking with other truckers on our radios. Makes me feel for Jacob all the more, trapped inside that little place.”