Wildside

  “Go away,” I said.

  “Charlie?” The muffled voice was Clara’s.

  “Nobody’s home.”

  “Charlie!”

  I groaned, then moved my leg down and slid the bench aside. She pushed the hatch up and I watched the nape of her neck as she climbed into the tower, head down to watch her hands and feet. There were fine blond hairs that continued down her neck and under her jacket and I wanted to follow them, to see where they went.

  When she’d closed that hatch again, I shifted the bench back on top of it, then put my leg back up.

  Clara straddled the other end of the bench facing me. Her eyes were wide and solemn. “You really scared us, Charlie.”

  I felt my face get red. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have fired the shotgun.”

  She shook her head. “Not that, Charlie. It was when you just left. That was scary. I don’t think we realized how much we depend on you until you walked away.”

  “Don’t push that on me!” I said, furious, frightened. “You’re adults. I’m not your parent!”

  She rocked back, shocked at my outburst.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my teeth.

  She put her hand on my good knee. “What is it, Charlie?”

  “I can’t hold it anymore! I’ve been holding it for so long—the risks, the dangers, the chance I’ll get one of you killed. Dad, Luis, Richard—I’m responsible and dammit, I’ve been responsible. I’ve tried to handle things but they just keep going to pieces—” I clamped my hands over my mouth to stop the sobs that threatened to burst forth.

  I took deep breaths, tried to slow them, tried to breathe it all out, to push it out of my body.

  Finally, I opened my eyes and said, “I don’t think you guys understand how much I depend on you.”

  Clara’s shocked look slowly changed to one of understanding. “So when we started fighting…”

  I nodded, mute.

  “If it’s worth anything, everybody apologized down there. Rick fell all over himself apologizing to Marie and Joey. Joey sends his apologies. Marie sat down in the grass and started bawling, saying how she didn’t like to act that way and didn’t know what came over her and could Rick ever forgive her? Now they’re all wondering about you.”

  She slid forward on the bench, moving her leg under my propped-up knee and moving her other leg over my good one. If it weren’t for our clothing, it would be like something from the Kama Sutra. She leaned into me, curling her arms in across her breasts. My arms went around her and she sighed deeply.

  “You don’t have to hold it alone, Charlie. We can help each other.” She slid her arms around me, her breasts pressing against me. She rubbed my lower back with her hands. “God, are you tense!” She kneaded harder.

  “Ow!”

  “Relax,” she said.

  I pushed my hands down her back and beneath the waistline of her jeans. She tensed suddenly.

  “Relax,” I said.

  She pushed her mouth against mine, suddenly, her tongue slipping between my lips. I worked my hands deeper, brushing my fingertips across her bottom, just tracing the elastic on the top of her bikini briefs. She breathed in deeply.

  “Oh, my,” she said.

  I moved one hand around to her breast and she brought her hands around, fumbling at my belt buckle.

  The radio came to life. “Charlie? Clara?”

  “Oh, shit!” I said.

  Clara sighed, then said, “Turn it off?”

  I closed my eyes and held her, breathing deeply, concentrating on the weight and the feel of her.

  “Help me hold it,” I finally said.

  “I was trying. I was trying!”

  We laughed like maniacs, then climbed down the ladder to the others.

  Marie burst into tears again, on seeing me, and I said, “Hey, it’s okay, Marie.”

  Rick looked uncomfortable. “I was an asshole, Charlie,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Joey hung his head, his hands twisting a clump of buffalo grass he’d carried in from outside. “I really need a meeting.” He threw the grass over his shoulder and in a much quieter voice said, “Sorry. This Land-of-the-Pharaohs shtick is getting to me. Wish we had your truck.”

  Now there was a notion. I unclipped my key chain from my belt loop and held it up.

  “Well, why not?” I said.

  There was a shallow bison wallow at the corner of the runway, an oblong depression perhaps three feet deep at its lowest spot. The trailer rolled down the gentle incline and into it easily.

  “You’re sure this is a safe spot?” Clara asked. “We don’t want to cut anybody in half when we turn it on.”

  I turned and peered at the hill again. “I think so. The shape of the hill is slightly different on this side and it’s hard to tell. If I’m right, though, this should open up where the old garden is—back by the compost heap. It won’t hurt if that gets chopped into. Besides, by lowering it down like we have, the gate should open up near or below the surface of the ground.”

  We untied the ropes holding the gate frame to the trailer and then went back to the hangar to eat supper and wait for full dark.

  We came back armed for bear, sabertooth, and wolf—our regular gear. We also brought the shovel and the long pole we’d used to turn the gate switch. We used our flashlights freely and made a lot of noise with the horns.

  Several birds took to the air and something small scurried away through the underbrush. We didn’t see or hear any predators, and the presence of the birds was evidence of their absence.

  I took the shovel and crawled under the trailer until I was centered under the gate frame. Clara joined me, muttering to herself. “I could’ve spent the summer cleaning horse stalls, but noooooooooooooo, I had to have adventures, see wildlife, travel to alternate universes.” She rolled over onto her back beside me with a groan. “God, I need a bath.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Lights off everybody. Remember—no talking after the gate is open.” The flashlights flicked off and the cold stars shone above, framed by the trailer cross members and our rough timber support beams. “When you’re ready, Rick.”

  “Close your eyes, guys.” Rick’s voice came through the dark. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “Opening the gate…now!”

  There was a flash of light visible through my eyelids and a wave of steam-laden air against my face. I opened my eyes. The stars were gone and the darkness above me was absolute. I reached up past the trailer frame and met dirt. Moist dirt, moderately packed, though some promptly fell onto my forehead. I turned the flashlight on.

  The gate frame, edge to edge, was filled with dark, root-twined dirt. “Well, we didn’t cut anybody in half,” I said to Clara.

  She turned on her flashlight. “Unless you count invertebrates.” She pointed at the truncated end of an earthworm, hanging out of the dirt face and wiggling.

  “Gross. How far down do you think we are?”

  She pulled a hoof pick from her rear pocket and pushed it into the dirt above. “Deeper than five inches.”

  I picked the shovel up and moved to the side, where I had a decent amount of space between the trailer and the edge of the gate frame.

  I could see the guys peering under the trailer, at the edge of the field. Rick pointed at his mouth and held up his hand in an “OK” sign. I said, “Sure, Rick, go ahead and talk. The gate opened underground.”

  “I can barely hear you, Charlie,” he said. His voice was oddly muffled. I probed around the edge of the gate frame at ground level, but the field went from the gate frame down into the ground, forming a wall all the way around Clara and me. I wondered if it was passing oxygen through and my heart started beating faster.

  I knew we could dig under it, a shallow tunnel leading beneath the field, but I didn’t know if we should bother. I spoke a little louder, pointing up. “I’m going to try and dig up through the ground.” I worked an area right next to the gate’s edge, lying off to one side and chopping down clo
ds of earth with the shovel. It was much easier than digging down—you didn’t have to lift the dirt out of a hole, but I quickly passed two feet without breaking through.

  Clara edged over and started moving the dirt that fell to one side. I borrowed her hoof pick and probed every couple of inches. I soon had a hole three feet from gate to top and was kneeling below it to dig. How could we be so far off? Then I hit grass roots, sparse, then thick. I probed and felt the pick break through.

  I knelt and held my finger to my lips, then pointed to my flashlight and turned it off. The others followed my example.

  I pulled the rest of the dirt down with my hands, carefully widening the hole until it was large enough for my head and the width of the hole below the surface was wide enough for my shoulders.

  Though it was probably redundant, I smeared dirt on my face to darken it, then, by standing on tiptoe, I lifted my head above the edge of the hole.

  It was overcast but the mercury vapor light in the barnyard shone lots of light on the scene. I was not as near the compost heap as I had thought, being about ten yards off, but I was out in the middle of nowhere, well away from the house and even farther from the barn. The ground stretched away, level with my eyes. I could see the windows of the living room, lit from within, and the back end of my truck, which was parked nose-in beneath the dining room window. There were soldiers standing at the front and back of the house as well as two standing before the barn. I saw lights out in the field and could make out two more soldiers seated in the open doorway of a Blackhawk helicopter. Several shiny unmarked cars were parked beside the barn and there were three panel trucks in front of the house. Rick’s car, which had been in the middle of the yard, was parked by the Mooney’s hangar.

  I looked more closely at the area around my truck, trying to see if there were any guards I was missing when I noticed something different about the house.

  There was a sheet of plywood covering the dining room window. Now why do you suppose…?

  I took bearings on the car, on the front of the house, and on the rear of the house, marking them first on the sides of the hole at chest level, then dropping down and drawing them in the dirt I’d stomped flat below my feet. I checked them several times, then, finally dropped back down and flashed my light back toward Rick.

  When I saw that I had his attention, I shined the light on my face and drew my finger across my throat. He nodded and stood. A few seconds later there was another flash from overhead and a thin layer of dirt fell, sagging earth cut from the tame side.

  I stood, brushing dirt out of my hair and off my shoulders.

  “This is looking more and more like Attack of the Mole People.” I shined my light on the ground, making sure my markings were still intact.

  “How far are we from the truck?” asked Rick.

  I pointed at my middle mark. “The back end is about fifteen yards in that direction. That’s the direction it’s headed, too. But we’re a lot lower than I thought. The ground on the ranch must’ve been graded up, or something. The gate is about three and a half feet below the surface where it is now. And there’s another thing. They’ve boarded over the window to the dining room.”

  “Maybe they broke it,” said Marie.

  I shrugged. “And maybe they’re trying to keep someone from getting out of that room.”

  “Your dad? Luis? And whathistoes—uh, Richard Madigan?” guessed Clara.

  I nodded.

  “Why didn’t they just put them back where they were?” said Rick.

  “Maybe they can’t,” I said. “This Bestworst guy is so far over the line that maybe he can’t trust the people who were holding Luis and Richard. He knows they’ve all seen the gate. Maybe he doesn’t want them to tell anybody else about it?”

  Joey licked his lips. “What’s he going to do? Hold them forever? Kill them?”

  I looked at Joey and didn’t say anything.

  “Luis really saved my ass,” Joey said. “I’d be in jail without his help. We can’t just leave him there.”

  “We could get caught,” said Rick. “Maybe the way to help them is to get away and get public. Let the power of the press save them.”

  Joey shook his head violently. “And maybe they’d just disappear. Maybe they’d just say, ‘What lawyers?’ and make sure that they were never seen again.”

  Rick looked skeptical and I said, “Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t. But if they don’t have them, it stops becoming an issue, right?”

  Rick looked at the sky. “Why do I think I’m going to regret this?”

  The hardest part was getting the gate out of that damn bison wallow. We ended up adding another rope with all of us, including Impossible, pulling to get it up out of that depression. Once out, we pulled it twenty yards in the direction of my truck.

  While Clara put Impossible back in the hangar, the rest of us dug a trench under the edge of the gate, so that we could pass under it when it was on.

  I did not lie underneath it this time. If we’d miscalculated and we opened it under the truck, or under a part of the foundation of the house, stuff falling through the gate could kill me. When I thought about it, I was surprised that all the dirt from our previous opening hadn’t buried Clara and me.

  We turned off our flashlights and Rick turned on the gate with his pole. Nothing flashed and nothing fell through—I wondered if we’d finally broken it—that it wasn’t coming on. I dropped down into the trench and squirmed under the field. When I looked up, through the gate, I saw thin lines of light shining between the cracks of floorboards.

  Bull’s-eye.

  I stood and looked around.

  My upper body was sticking out of the gate into the crawl space under the house. There was a poured concrete foot around the outside edge of the house and joists and outer walls rested on this. The floor of the crawl space was dirt. Cobwebs brushed my hair and I could see the access door at the side of the house, outlined in orange light from the mercury vapor light in the yard.

  I carefully felt the edge of the gateway—a place where I could see the trailer below on one side and dirt floor of the crawl space about eight inches below the other side. The field formed a surface about four inches inward from this edge. When I wrapped my fingers around the outer edge they continued to encounter a similar surface underneath. I traced a little deeper and the surface flowed up, toward me, but I didn’t see anything. I shivered.

  I crawled up over the edge, onto the dirt floor, and out of curiosity I stuck my head back under the edge of the gate.

  Above me was the upper half of the gate and, above that, stars.

  I pulled my head out quickly, shaking.

  Clara and Joey’s upper half appeared out of the gate. They were peering through the gloom and I realized that my eyes had adjusted somewhat. I leaned close and said, “The scope?”

  Clara pushed the stethoscope from our medical supplies into my hand. I crawled over to the dining room and crouched. Already I could hear Luis’s voice, but not the words. What I wanted to know is who else was with them and where in the room they were.

  “—call it conspiracy to deprive a citizen of his civil rights. Conspiracy is, after all, yet another felony.”

  Another voice said, “It’s very hard to sue the government. You know that. They have all the legal resources in the world and it’ll just keep going, appeal after appeal. Frankly, I just want to get out of here, preferably alive.” That was Madigan.

  “All that is very nice,” said a third voice—Dad. “But it’s all contingent on ever getting out of these guys’ hands.” I would’ve loved to hear more, but there was work to do.

  First, I spot-checked the other rooms. Someone was snoring in my bedroom. There were people talking in low voices in the kitchen, and I heard footsteps on the stairs and the rush of water as someone upstairs was taking a shower.

  That made me angry—more angry than the guy sleeping in my bed. I was covered in dirt and sweat and half-afraid that they’d smell me long
before they ever saw me. And these assholes were using my shower.

  I crawled back to the gate and gave the stethoscope back to Clara. Marie handed me the tape measure and turned on her flashlight, holding it in her mouth while she wrote on a pad. I measured the distance from the gate edge to the outside wall and crawled back, my thumb marking the spot on the tape. She’d shine her light on it and jot it down. We took some more measurements and then Clara handed me a coat hanger with a piece of white cloth tied to its end.

  At the end of the dining room, next to the wall, was a knothole that had fallen out long ago. It had been plugged with a piece of cork. I located it with my flashlight and, using Clara’s hoof pick, pushed it up from beneath, slowly. I listened to see if any of them would notice, but they didn’t stop talking. I pushed about two feet of coat hanger wire through the hole and then waved it gently back and forth, careful not to scrape it against the wall.

  Luis’s voice stopped in mid-sentence and I heard the floorboards creak as he stood up and walked toward the wall. As he got closer, I pulled the coat hanger back through the hole. When I heard his footsteps stop I put my finger through the hole and wiggled it, then put my mouth up to the hole and said quietly, “Luis.”

  “Charlie?” he sounded incredulous.

  Dad’s voice said, “Charlie! What are you doing?”

  “Quiet!” I hissed. “Put your ear to the hole.”

  The light from the hole was blocked. “Do they leave you alone, in there?”

  I heard Dad shift to turn his head. “We have a bathroom break coming up and then they leave us alone until morning. I can hear the guards outside, though.”

  “Do you still have your watch?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We’re opening the gate into that room in exactly two hours and twenty minutes. You need to stay away from the end of the dining room next to the kitchen. Is that possible, and is anybody likely to come through that door?”

  He shifted. “No. That’s the door they boarded up. They use the door to the living room. We can move our cots against the outside wall after the bathroom break.”