Chapter 14: Stone Garden

Stone Garden

Tank got to him first. He put two fingers under Delgado’s nose and held them there a while, then took them back and wiped them on his thigh, twice.

“He’s not breathing.”

I went over on my hands and knees and put two fingers on the side of Delgado’s throat, under the jaw, and felt for the pulse. There was none. I moved half an inch and felt again. There was none there either.

I never told anybody I did it twice.

“All right,” I said. “We cover him.”

I got the entrenching tool off my belt and started to unfold it, and Chee’s hand came down flat on the handle before I had it locked.

He pointed at the floor between his boots. “Not here.”

“I’m not digging for anything. I’m digging a hole.”

“Not here.” The same two words in the same flat voice, and his hand did not come off the handle.

Tank held the lamp up over the two of us. He was quiet, which he was not built for. Then he said, “That bug came up out of nine inches of dirt on the end of my shovel. Sunny draw. Grass on top of it. Nine inches.”

I looked at the floor between Chee’s boots for a second. Then I folded the tool and put it back on my belt.

We covered Delgado with rock.

It took better than an hour. The rubble in that hole was wet and half of it was too big for one man to lift, and Chee and Tank carried the slabs in and worked them around him and over him while I held the lamp up. It was not a job I would have given to two men in the dark with one lamp between them, but it was the job we had. Chee set the last piece himself and squared it with both hands.

Then I said the words.

I had two sets and neither one fit. The first came out of the Army, and it went into that room of limestone and came back off the walls, and it sounded like a man at a depot reading a feed order off a clipboard. The second was the kind I had heard as a boy, standing in a coat in a cold yard, and I got four words into it and quit, because it belonged to that yard and that weather and those people, and we were under a mountain on the other side of the world from all three.

So I said what was true and kept it short. That he had people, and that they were going to hear it from a stranger in a uniform instead of from us. That he came down into that mountain because he was told to and never asked one of us for a thing. That we were sorry. Then I stood there with my hands at my sides and no idea what to do with them.

“That was nice, Hollis,” Tank said.

“Shut up.”

“No, that was nice. You missed your trade. You ought to be up at Division writing that stuff for the chaplain’s shop.”

“Shut up, Tank.”

“You’ll do the next one too,” he said. “I already decided.”

Chee had not said a word while I talked and he did not say one back. When I was through he took his helmet off and stood at the head of the pile with it in both hands, facing off toward something I could not put a name to, long enough that Tank got tired of standing still and started shifting his feet on the rock. Then Chee put the helmet back on and picked up his rifle.

Six days earlier I would have had something to say about that. I did not say anything. I still do not know whether that was respect or whether I was too tired to open my mouth.

We put everything we had on a flat piece of rock and counted it, mostly because it gave the four of us something to do with our hands.

Ammunition: Chee, nineteen rounds. Tank, sixteen. Me, twenty-two.

Grenades: two.

Rifles: three, one apiece for Chee, Tank and me. Voss did not have one and did not pretend otherwise.

Compass: one, Voss’s, on a lanyard around her neck. Altimeter: one, Voss’s, in a case on her belt. First-aid kit: one, also hers. Lamp: one, the good one, on her belt, where it had hung since the truck. Flashlight: one, Chee’s, which had gone off after the first look around the bottom of that hole and had stayed off since, to save what was in the cells.

Food: none. What we had was in the packs we dropped at the bottom of that draw, or in the mud under the slide, or already eaten, and it came to the same thing either way. The rest of it was on our belts and in our pockets when we fell, which is the only reason there was anything to count.

“The map case is gone too,” Voss said. “I had it when we went out.”

“I know.”

“I want that on the record.”

“You dropped it because I told you to drop it,” Tank said.

She looked at him a second. Then she said, “That’s right,” and neither of them said anything else about it, which I thought well of both of them for, then and later.

I gave us two days. I do not know where the number came from. I know what it was for, which was to keep the four of us pointed one way and out of an argument. We had no radio — Keene had gone into that draw with the set on his back and it did not come down with us. We had no map, one compass, one lamp and one flashlight, and a hill behind us with half a mile of wet slope sitting in the door.

My grandfather had one rule about ground.

Water gets out.

I said it out loud that first night, sitting on the rock with the lamp between us, because saying it made it a thing the four of us had instead of a thing I had.

Tank said, “That’s it?”

“That’s the whole of it. The rest is paperwork.”

He thought about that a while, and then he said, “My uncle sold insurance,” which was about as close as Tank came to agreeing with anybody.

Whatever is down there, my grandfather said, whatever it is made of and however long it has been down there, the water inside it is going somewhere, and if you can hear it going, you are hearing the only survey anybody ever ran on that hole. In ‘52 he told a man on the Halloran place where to drill, with two dry holes already behind him, off a wet seam in a cutbank, and they hit water at forty feet. The next hole they put down on his say-so came up dry as a bone, and he liked telling that part. A forked stick that is right every time is a stick that has not been out enough.

I put my hand flat on the wall of that hole and put to it the question he would have put.

Where is the water going.

We went north and down.

Eleven hours the first stretch, then twelve, and I counted, because counting was the only clock we had. There was no going back out the way we came in. A hill the size of a church was sitting in the mouth of that seam and the seam was under it, and neither one of them was going to move on our account. It was north or it was nowhere.

The farther we went the wider the place got. The first stretch of it was a slot you could touch both sides of without stretching your arms. By the end of the first day it had opened to the width of a road, then to the width of a field, and the floor of it flattened out, and there was a ceiling up there somewhere that the lamp did not find.

Voss read the altimeter three times that night, and on the third one she gave me the number. Converted, it put us a little under five hundred feet above sea level. She had set the instrument that morning at the truck, and the truck was at eleven thousand. Then she put the lamp on the face of it and read it over again, to be sure of what she had just said, and gave me both numbers a second time, so that I would have to do something with them.

Tank asked her if it was broken.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

Nobody did anything with it after that.

The second day, I heard the water.

It was moving. Not dripping, not coming down a wall — moving the way a river moves, with a set and a direction. It was coming from the north and a little west of north, and water that moves like that comes out of somewhere and goes somewhere else. So there was an end to that hole, and the end of it was downhill of us.

Then the walls glared.

The light went off the rock and came back to me in pieces, all different sizes, and I stopped everybody where they stood and turned the lamp slow across the face in front of us, and the face was covered in crystal. Plates and points and dog-tooth corners, wet-looking, black until the beam moved off them. Tank already had his hand out to break one off.

“Don’t,” Voss said. She had come up beside me.

“Calcite,” she said. “Spar. The flat ones under it are gypsum.” She said it the way she said things, quick and flat, like footnotes on a map. “It grew in water, in a crack in this rock. It grows in layers. That takes time.”

“What’s it worth?” Tank said.

“Nothing.”

He put his hand back down. “Then I don’t care about it.”

“This isn’t the rock I’d expect to find it in,” Voss said, mostly to herself, and she did not say what she would have expected instead, and I did not ask her, because I was listening to the water and I had already put the lamp up the passage past the crystals.

The passage opened out again, and I put the lamp into it, and the first thing I saw was wood.

Trunks. Hundreds of them, standing. No bark, no branches, gray-black in the light and turned to stone, every one of them upright in the ground, and the ground they stood in was in ledges, one above the other, so that the trunks went up in tiers, rank above rank, up the face of it, and the lamp did not reach the top. There was no telling how many. I counted nine ledges and stopped.

And every trunk in it had red on it.

They were all through the wood, in the joints where the limbs had been and along the seams of the old bark, thousands of them, points of red so small and so faint you could lose them in a blink. I knew what they were before anybody told me. Tank had turned one out of nine inches of dirt with the end of his shovel, and it had worn the same shell, red and hard, with something moving inside it the way light moves on water, and what came out of that shell in that draw had gone through the squad in a couple of minutes while we stood and watched.

“They’re asleep,” I said.

Nobody answered that.

Voss got as close as she was going to get and put the lamp along the nearest trunk.

“It’s trees,” she said finally. “They’re trees. Silica replaced the wood, cell by cell. That takes water and it takes burial and it takes more time than anything else down here has had. And they’re standing where they grew.” Her voice changed on that last part and she stopped.

“What does that mean.”

“It means they were buried in something and the something is gone.” She was quiet a second. “I can’t tell you what that was. I’m telling you what the wood is. The rest of it I don’t have.”

Chee had not come into the room. He was back in the passage behind us with his light off and his rifle across him, and where the passage was low he had gone down on one knee, and he did not take one step farther.

“Chee.”

“No.”

“Come look at it.”

“No.”

“Chee. We may have to walk in it.”

“I know what you may have to do,” he said, very flat, almost patient with me, the way you talk to a man who is not getting it.

“Are you telling me not to go in, or telling me what happens if we do?”

“Both.” Not angry. He shook his head the way he had shaken it over the rock, the same shake, and then he looked at the floor in front of him, and that was the end of it. He did not come in.

I looked at the wood a while longer, and at the red on it, and then I told Tank we were backing out, and we backed out.

We kept to the wall on the west side going out, which was how we had come in. I was on point with the lamp, Tank behind me, and Chee behind Tank in the dark with one hand on the wall, and about forty yards back along the passage Chee stepped off into nothing.

There was a channel there, a cut in the floor a yard and a half wide and a yard deep, running along the base of the west wall. Something had filled it once and it was empty now, and it had a lip on it a man could walk past a hundred times in a bright room and never see. In the dark you walk past it once.

The sound he made was short and he got most of it back. I put the lamp down into the cut. He was on one knee with both hands on his foot, and when he moved his hands I saw what he had come down on.

The floor of that channel was stone wood. The whole bottom of it, hundreds of pieces, broken limbs and shards of the old trunks, all of it turned and all of it sharp, and he had put his right foot down on one of the ends. It had come up through the sole of the boot, through the arch of his foot, and out the top of the boot, and the end of it stood up out of the leather like a splinter out of a plank.

Tank got to him first and had a hand over Chee’s mouth before Chee had any chance to make noise with it, and Chee did not need it, or if he did he did not fight it. He had both hands on Tank’s arm and he was breathing through it, hard, in and out, and his eyes were on me and not on his foot.

I put one hand on his ankle and got the other around the wood and pulled it up out of there in one go, straight up the way it had gone in, and Chee came up off the rock about two inches and went back down.

Voss had the kit open before I asked for it. She got the boot unlaced and off him without hurrying, cut the sock away, put what was in the tin into the two holes, laid gauze over the one in the top of the foot and packed the one in the sole, and ran the wrap down tight over all of it. Then she sat back on her heels.

“There’s a hole through the sole and a hole out the top, and one of them is through the arch,” she said. “He can put weight on it or he can’t. We find out when he stands up.”

“Give me a minute,” Chee said.

He got his minute. Then he stood up, and he stood, and he took a step on it, and then another one, and got white around the mouth and did not say anything else.

I sat down on the edge of the cut with my hands wet and looked at it.

I want to be exact about what I saw next, because it is the part of that night I have gone over the most.

The channel Chee fell into was not a ditch. The sides of it were smooth and the bottom of it was a bed of rolled stone under the wood, and a ditch somebody digs does not have rolled stone in the bottom of it. Water ran in that cut once, and ran fast, and ran long. And it ran from south to north along the base of the wall, straight, the whole length of that room as far as the lamp reached.

The wood stood in a rank beside it, and the wood was dead trees standing where they grew, which meant the ground they grew in had been a bottom, and a bottom has a river in it. The south end of that cut went back the way we had come. So the water had come in from the south and run north in this bed, and then stopped running in it, and left it dry.

Water does not stop. It changes.

So there was another one. Somewhere north of that room the water had got tired of this bed and taken a new one, the way it does in every flat valley anybody has ever farmed, and the new one would be at the far side of that stand of stone trees, with the stream that used to be in this one still in it or gone dry the same way.

I got off my heels and stood up and put the lamp along the west wall and looked at both of them together, the dead bed under my boots and the wall it ran against, and then down the line of it to where the red started.

My grandfather would have had it in ten seconds, off the shape of the ground. I got it the other way, off the water and the stone and the roadbuilding, which is slower but lands in the same place.

If I was wrong, four of us were going to find that out on the far side, in the dark, with the red on our heads, and there was no arguing our way back out of it. So I did not ask anybody. I gave Tank the flashlight, in case the red came off that wood while I was gone, and I kept the lamp, put it between my teeth, laid the rifle across my back, and went along the outside of the cut on my belly, counting.

Two hundred and eleven steps. That is how far it was from where we sat to the far side of that stand of trees the way I went, which was flat on my front, along the base of the west wall, where the trunks were thinnest and the floor was flattest.

The wood went over me the whole way. The red was overhead for most of it, close enough in places that I could have put a hand up, and I did not put a hand up. Once, something moved along under there that was not a wind, and the red moved with it, all together, the way a field moves when weather goes over it, and then it was still again.

On the far side the rock bellied out, and there was the second cut.

It was wider than the first one, three yards across, maybe four, and it ran west and north. The wall of it was wet. The water I had been listening to for two days was not in it, but it was close, close and moving, and it was going north and west, the same way the cut ran.

And on the dry shelf above the waterline, somebody had been.

There were tools. A shovel with the blade worn down to a nub, maybe half the width it had started. Picks with the heads rusted into the rock, so that when I put a hand on one the handle came away and the head stayed where it was. There was a crate, and the boards of it were dry and gray, and there was nothing stenciled on it, no name, no number, no paint. There was timber — cribbing, cut and fitted and stacked, holding up a section of the cut wall, dry as the crate, sawn and fitted by hands, and whoever did it had known exactly what he was doing.

I sat there with the lamp on it and could not have told you what year it was from, or who came down here to work a shovel down to a nub, or what had been in that crate once. I did not open it. I have called that sense before now. It was not sense.

Then I turned around and went back under the trees the same way I had come.

Tank wanted to go back.

“Back where,” I said.

“Back to the seam.”

“It’s under a hill.”

“Everything’s under something. We find the seam, we dig in the seam —“ he was up and moving while he talked, the way he did it — “we got two grenades. We blow the seam, we come out in the slide, and we walk down off that hill. Two days walking gets us to a road. Two days.”

I let him finish. He was not wrong about the grenades.

“What you would be doing is taking the hill off the top of that seam,” I said. “That’s two grenades and luck, and the luck is the part I don’t like. The seam is under the hill. The hill is wet and it moved this morning and it will move again. You crack that rock and the hill comes down into the crack, and then there’s no seam and no grenades and no us.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know water. There’s a river in here. It came in somewhere and it goes out somewhere, and it does not go out through that seam, because if it went out through that seam we would be standing in it. Whatever the water does, we can do. We’re smaller than it is.”

He chewed on that a while with his mouth working, which was about as close as Tank came to losing an argument. Then he said, “That’s a lot of talking for a man who’s guessing.”

“It’s not a guess. It’s a direction.”

“A direction under a million sleeping bugs.”

“Two hundred and eleven steps of it. I counted.”

“Chee,” I said. “Can you walk two hundred yards?”

“Yes.”

“Under the trees.”

He thought about that. He took his time, more time than Tank would ever have given him.

“Yes,” he said. “Not happy.”

“Nobody’s happy.”

Somebody laughed. It was Voss, once, short, with nothing behind it, and it was the last sound any of the four of us made for a while.

So that was the plan, which is a large word for a thing like that. One lamp. Three rifles, and fifty-seven rounds between us. Nothing to eat. Two days to find a way out, and no idea where we were standing. One way out: along the west wall, under the stone trees, in the dark, down the floor of an old riverbed, past a stand of dead wood with a million sleeping insects on it, for two hundred and eleven of my steps.

Tank said, “So we’re doing this.”

We were.

I handed Voss the lamp. I put Chee on my right with two fingers through my belt, so the foot could take what it could take and no more, and Tank took the rear with the grenades on his belt behind him, which is where I wanted them.

Then I went first, and I put my hand on the first trunk, and I stepped under the wood.