I’ve been standing here for four minutes and I just now notice that the door, only a dozen feet away, is partially open. Did Tex not shut it all the way after getting Bobby squared away in there to spend the night? Or did an intruder open it? Wouldn’t they have seen that on the monitors? But Lam is out in the yard holding an intruder at gunpoint so that leaves only Trai watching six monitors, twelve half screens with something happening on nearly all of them. Could he have missed it?
I palm the door all the way open and bolt into the dark room. The bed has been pushed back and the trap door is lying next to the square opening in the floor. Oh man, an open trapdoor would be an obvious place for an intruder to look for people hiding.
Please no. Don’t let the boy be hurt. If anything happened…
“Bobby?” I yell loudly, scrambling down the wooden ladder.
“Sam!” His voice is far away, muffled. Alive. “Sa—”
Sounds of a struggle, grunts and bodies slamming together.
At the bottom of the hole, I scrunch myself as small as I can and peer through the twenty-five feet of tunnel to the carved-out room. The ceiling there is more than three feet above the top of the tunnel, so all I can see are two sets of legs, Bobby’s and someone else’s. Looks like that someone is jamming Bobby against the dirt wall.
“Peroneal nerve strike,” I shout, hoping the man doesn’t understand and that Bobby remembers the strike I showed him. I squeeze into the tight tunnel, my shoulders and back crumbling dirt away from its sides. “Hit the outside of his front thigh with your knee.”
He does, and I hear a grunt and see the struck leg sag to the right a little.
“Hit it again.”
I’m inching along as fast as I can. The smell of dirt nauseating, like ancient swamp and rotten jungle, which it probably is. Don’t know why it didn’t bother me last time, but it does now. On top of that, dragging my body in the dirt is really inflaming the cement burns on my stomach and chest.
I cover the first ten feet without much of a physical hitch but now I’m slowing. Why? Because the walls are so close, that’s why. So is the ceiling. Is the tunnel tapered? Why would the digger make it tapered? No, that can’t be right. I don’t remember that from last time I crawled through this thing. Got to be in my mind, but I swear the tunnel is getting sma…
Uh oh.
Uh oh is never a good thing to say to yourself when you’re in a cramped tunnel. But my butt is stuck and my arms are pinned under me, like I’m at the bottom of a pushup, and I can’t push up because there is a ton or more of hard-packed earth above me, and I can’t push back or pull myself forward, either.
Bobby knees the man’s outer leg. This time the guy grunts loudly and bends enough in the direction of the pain that I can see the top of his head for a moment.
Having trouble breathing now. Oh man. There’s no room for my chest to expand, and my neck is cramping from holding my head up. No, the cramping can’t be from that. Must be from the hit I got when Mai and I were jumped and from the fight with Khmer Rouge Man at the warehouse tonight. He really stretched my neck with that scissor move.
Hey, I’m wiggling my butt, which is more than I could do ten seconds ago, but I still can’t push with my hands.
Sweating like crazy. Back of my neck is cramping bad now, right where it connects to my… I can’t… hold it up any longer.
My face plops into the old swamp dirt. So foul. When I jerk my head up, I bang it painfully against the ceiling, showering dirt down on me. It’s all over my sweaty face. Aagh, I just swallowed some.
Starting to lose it here folks. Why is this getting to me this time? I felt a little claustrophobia when Samuel and I crawled through here a few days ago, but this time… Maybe because I got some serious stress going on now. That’s what my shrink would say. I just went through all that business at the warehouse, plus Samuel isn’t here to joke with me like he did before.
Okay, nice psychoanalysis, but it doesn’t help because now I’m feeling light headed. Nauseous. Nausea from dining on old jungle dirt with animal crap in it.
Got to stay calm. Got to stay calm. Force myself to relax. Relax. Come on body, reeeelax.
My butt disconnects with the ceiling. My hips are free. What the…? Guess I got confused in my little panic attack. Thought my hips were on the floor of the tunnel and my butt was jammed against the ceiling. Must have been pushing my rear up against it and I didn’t know. Actually, I’ve got a couple inches to maneuver, but my jammed arms are still preventing me from going forward. My fisted hands are pinned at mid chest and my knuckles are gouging into my chest plate. I can’t even uncurl my fingers. So hard to breathe.
Wait, now that I know I can make little up and down motions with my butt, I can move backwards an inch.
“Sam!” Bobby’s face is at the end of the tunnel. “Sam, it worked. That leg nerve thing. He’s down and hurtin’. That was freakin’ awesome.” He looks behind him at the room. “But I want to go now. It really sucks in here.”
I spit out some dirt but more of it is caught in my throat. Panic rising again. The dirt is tickling my gag reflex. I snap my head to the side and bang my face into the wall. Oh my God! I’m going to choke to death down here.
Stay calm. Must stay calm. Staaaay calm.
The gob of dirt slowly moves down past my gag reflex.
“Bob-aah,” dirt comes up from my throat into my mouth. I spit it out.
Bobby looks behind him again, then back at me. “I’m coming in, Sam,” he says, oblivious to my plight. “I’m getting freaked in this room.”
Freaked. That makes two of us. I hump a couple more times so that my hands are under my neck now so that I can uncurl my fingers. Small pleasures. Three more humps… My arms are free! I thrust them forward to release the cramps. Got dirt on my teeth, but I smile anyway, thinking how I must look like Superman flying through the tunnel.
“Sam,” Bobby says crawling toward me with much greater ease than I’m exhibiting. “Move back.”
I try to speak but my voice sounds like a growling Chihuahua. I spit up dirt again.
“You okay?”
Do I look okay? I nod and hit my head on the ceiling. Another dirt shower. But I can move now, just not as fast as Bobby. I draw my hands back toward me a few inches and push against the dirt floor with my palms. That gained me about four inches. Better than not moving at all, I always say whenever I’m stuck in a tunnel.
“Sam, I’m closing on you. Move faster,” Bobby says, his face about a foot from mine. Teenagers. Never satisfied. “I’m not sure how long the dude is going to stay down. He’s hurting but he might—”
His eyes widen a hair of a second before his face slams into the dirt. He begins sliding backwards, his fingers raking the soil.
“Sam!” he yells, his voice muffled by the dirt.
I grab his wrists but my leverage is poor.
“He’s got my ankles!” He screams, spit and dirt spraying from his mouth. “Pull me, Sam. Harder.”
I try, but my hands slip down over his sweat-slick wrists and my elbows hit the walls. We clasp hands for a few seconds before the man’s strength advantage pulls them apart, so that now I’m holding only his middle finger on one hand and his thumb on the other.
“Ick m,” I wheeze, hoping he understands.
“I… can’t kick him. Can’t… chamber my leg.”
Bobby’s thrashing is churning up a cloud of dust. I begin coughing, but somehow manage to maintain my grip on his fingers. A few seconds later, I hack a hard, sputtering cough that breaks my concentration and my grip on his thumb. Then his middle finger slips out of my hand and he’s sucked backward out of the dirt tube.
“Saaaamm!”
Pushing with my feet and pulling on the dirt with my fingers. Got to get into the room, got to get into the room. Must be careful not to draw my arms too far back and get them jammed under me again.
Bobby is lying on the floor, but all I can see of the man are his arms and hands grabbing at the boy. Bobby kicks him, once, twice. All roundhouses. I can’t see where his feet are landing, but I can hear them and they sound like solid hits. Must be body shots. Another roundhouse and the man grunts loudly.
I’m about five feet from the room, the equivalent, effort-wise, of crawling fifty yards uphill up on the surface. Found a nice little rhythm of pull, push, pull, push that’s moving me forward at a steady pace and keeping my panic needle on the front edge of the red zone.
Now I can see the man up to his midsection. He’s circling Bobby as the boy spins on his rear and kicks to keep the guy at bay. The man lashes out with a sloppy front kick and the boy sweeps it aside with his lower leg. Nice move. But the attacker’s next kick lands hard on Bobby’s ribs.
“Shin kick,” I shout, my voice sounding almost normal, in spite of spitting out dirt.
Bobby looks into the tunnel, his face grimacing from the blow to his side. “Do what?”
“Look at him, not at me! Kick his shin hard and get up.”
“Like,” he chambers his knee, “this?” He rams the sole of his barefoot into the closest shin. The man grunts, lifts his leg, and covers the kicked spot with both hands.
“Exactly like that. Now get up and finish him. Hit his bladder like I showed you the other day.”
Bobby’s up and circling. I’m close enough to the room now that I can see the attacker’s chest. He lunges at the boy, locking him into a tight clinch. They struggle.
“Knees, Bobby. Knee his bladder, then punch it.”
The two slam into the back wall, shaking loose dirt and small stones. Bobby starts to drive in a knee, but the man spins him around three hundred and sixty degrees and right back into the wall. More dirt sifts down. The man who dug the tunnel and the room probably didn’t factor in people ramming into it as if it were a football tackling sled. I’m about four push-pulls from the end of the tunnel now.
What is that? Something on the ground next to the table. Looks like… it is. A knife. Just the handle, though. My eyes travel up the wall. There. A blade, imbedded in the hard dirt. What the hell?
Bobby drives in a hard knee hit, but the man turns at the last second and the blow hits his hip instead of his bladder. He still feels it, though, because his torso dips low to that side. He recovers. Still in a clinch, the man spins the lighter boy around in a tight circle and flings him into the wall again. Bobby’s head hits first this time, stunning him, dropping him to one knee.
“Bobby!” I shout, my head free of the tunnel. I start to pull myself all the way into the room when the man lunges across the small space and kicks at me. This time I voluntarily drop my face into the dirt, feeling his foot pass through my hair. It hits the top edge of the tunnel, giving me yet another dirt shower. I lift my head just enough to see him chamber his leg and fire off another. I snap my head hard to the right. The kick misses, but the side of my head hits the tunnel rim so hard that I see spots of light. Maybe, just maybe, sticking my head out of the tunnel isn’t a good move.
Out of the corner of my dirt-filled eye, I see him chamber again. He’s not a skilled kicker, but that doesn’t mean that a hard boot to the face wouldn’t hurt. Not waiting to see if the third time really is a charm, I scoot back into the tunnel, pushing with the heels of my hands and moving my pelvis like a two-hundred-pound inchworm.
His ugly face fills the tunnel exit, sweaty, in his forties, with a wispy goatee, a splattering of old pockmarks, and eyes that lack any semblance of humanity.
He dives at me, hands stretched in front of him, and splashes dirt into my face. Because I just did a push-back, he plops onto my extended arms, pinning them under his chest, palms down. His body seals off the majority of the light behind him, while mine is already sealing off most of the light from the bulb at the entryway behind me. What little illumination finds its way around my frame is reflected in his left eye.
Trying to extract my arms out from under him gets me nowhere; the angle is wrong—bad leverage and his weight is too much. I do my inchworm thing with my hips, but without the accompanying push of my pinned hands, I can’t move back.
He smiles and dirt drops from his teeth like blood from a vampire’s canines. He cups the sides of my face and cranks my head to my left. When I resist, he goes with the flow and twists it to the right. So I resist back to the left. I am, at this moment, extremely grateful that I’ve always included neck bridges in my workouts, but it’s exhausted from the strain of holding my head up and hurting from two previous fights.
I try to chomp into his palm, but he’s sees it coming and slides it up to push against my nose. The pressure is only on one side, so I can still breathe a little, but, I can feel the onset of panic.
Our faces are no more than a foot apart, our eyes locked, as he continues to push against my nose and twist my head while I strain not to let him. Maybe it’s because my breathing is ragged or my panic is showing in my eyes, he moves his hand just enough to seal off the other side of my nose.
Noooo! I push my head against his hands but he still has the better leverage. The pressure on my nose is crushing and my eyes are tearing heavily. Something pops in my neck, a cord, a muscle, I don’t know what. There’s no pain, but that sound can’t be a good thing.
He muscles my head against the wall. The good news is that my skull can’t go any farther and the doubly good news is that his hand slipped off my nose. But now he’s pushing the right side of my forehead, my right eye, and the right side of my mouth into the dirt, which is crumbling all around my face.
Don’t fight the push; move it in a different direction.
My words. I’ve taught students that when someone pushes them against a wall with their hands, they shouldn’t push back against the force because if the attacker is stronger, he wins. Since a person is only strong in one direction at a time, the key is to disrupt the course of their energy. If his energy is pushing straight in, they should abruptly force that energy up, down, or to the side.
I jerk my head down as hard as I can. It only moves about three inches before my chin smacks into the dirt, but it’s enough that he loses his forward pressure a little. When he lifts his upper body a tad to adjust to the different position, I’m able to rotate my hands enough to turn them over so that now he’s lying on my palms.
Just as he purchases another strong hand position on my head, probably to push my face into the loose dirt to smother me, I close both fists on his nipples, as Mai did on that jerk in the tea shop. That guy screamed and so does this one.
He releases my head and grabs at my upper arms to push me away, but he doesn’t have sufficient room to affect my hold. So I squeeze harder and twist my hands right and left as if turning radio knobs to connect with my favorite radio station, a top forty, all screams all the time.
With no other option, he eats the pain and grabs at my head again. Okay, if he wants it so badly, he can have it. Using his nipples as handles, I pull myself about six inches into him and headbutt his nose. His screams take on a different pitch this time, one that hurts my ears. So I slam my forehead into his nose again. His pitch is even higher, and louder.
It dawns on me that I don’t want to knock the man unconscious, since I don’t have the leverage to push him out of the tunnel, and I don’t know if the boy is in any condition to pull him.
So I bite him. I chomp into that fat part of the cheek that women rouge, sinking my teeth in deep and shaking my head like a dog with a chew toy. The good news is that his screams have reached a pitch only dogs can hear, but the bad news is that all his desperate thrashing is breaking dirt loose from the tunnel walls.
“Bobby!” I shout. “You okay?”
“I think so,” he says weakly. The human plug is muffling his voice.
When I squeeze the man’s nipples again, he doesn’t react as intensely. Maybe I’ve destroyed his nerves. So I attack them differently by digging into them with my fingernails. This has a different affect on the man’s pain receptors so that again he thrashes about, his shoulders banging both sides of the crumbling tunnel walls. A sprinkling of dirt falls from the ceiling this time.
All that thrashing frees my hands. Man, that feels good. I still can’t punch him, but I can claw the bloody mess I’ve made out of his cheek.
“Bobby,” I shout. Don’t know if he can hear me over this guy’s bellows. “Pull his legs. Pull him out.”
“Okay… Saaaam!”
“Bobby? Bobby!”
“Sa… Sam!”
The man’s hands are on my face again, pushing me.
“Sam! SAM!”
“Pull him,” I shout through the man’s fingers. I chomp on one of them. He yelps and yanks it away. I can taste blood.
“The wall, Sam!” The man’s body jerks back about twelve inches. Yes, Bobby’s pulling him.
“That’s it,” I shout. I push on the man’s forehead. “Keep pulling. Pull him hard.”
“Saaaam!”
What the hell? “Bobby?”
“The wall. It’s… caving in on me.”
*
“Pull him harder,” I shout. “Pull him all the way out.”
“Dirt,” Bobby cries. “The wall—”
“Hit him in the groin, Son.”
Bobby is freaking, but as long as I can hear his voice I know he’s all right.
The man claws desperately at the dirt each time he slides back a few inches, but between me pushing his face, and the excruciating pain from his torn nipples, broken nose, bit cheek, and chomped finger, he has very little strength left to resist.
He suddenly cries out and shakes his head so hard and fast that it’s nearly a blur. Kid must have punched him in the cookies.
He rolls onto his side a little, probably wanting to curl into the fetal position. There isn’t enough room for that, but the move allows me to see Bobby’s arms pulling on the man’s legs.
“Come on, Bobby. He’s half way out. Just a little more—”
A chunk of tunnel ceiling drops onto the man’s head, a clump about the size of a basketball. One second it was there, the next it breaks away and drops six inches onto his skull and crumbles about his head. It blocks some of the light that was coming in from the tunnel.
He’s not moving. I don’t think that thump on the head was hard enough to hurt him; he’s probably spent. We got to get him completely out so Bobby can get in.
“Push him, Sam,” Bobby shouts. “I can’t pull him anymore. I can’t… reach him.”
Can’t reach him?
The man suddenly grabs my face again. I slap his hands aside, scoop up some freshly fallen dirt, and grind it into his crushed nose. Then, as he coughs and sputters, I hit that suffering nose with a palm-heel strike, a weak one, given my lousy position, but he screams nonetheless. He stops when another chunk of earth falls on his head. It’s not as large as the first one, but anything falling from the ceiling is not a good thing since we’re still six feet under and twenty-five feet away from my bedroom.
One last face push gets him out of the tunnel, taking with him much of the freshly fallen dirt. He shrinks into that fetal position he’s been wanting.
“Bobby,” I say, pulling myself forward until my head extends part way into the room. “Drag him off to the side and—Oh my…”
The right wall has given way and collapsed into the room filling the right half with nearly three feet of dirt. Bobby is standing in it mid-thigh deep, his face white as he watches transfixed the slow-moving avalanche spill more and more into the room.
“Hey, man.”
He doesn’t respond. “Bobby!”
His eyes find mine, his words come out measured and barely audible. “It’s burying me. I can’t move my legs. So heavy.”
A chunk of the rim lands just in front of my face, and another piece from the ceiling inside the tunnel lands on the man’s legs a couple of feet in front of me. My heart rate needle blips into the red. I’m thinking that as long as I’m occupying this part of the tunnel it can’t collapse. Okay, that’s not logical but I’m running with it. Counting on it.
“Take my hand,” I say, extending mine. “I’ll pull you out.”
Bobby leans forward as far as he can against his locked knees. It’s not enough; our hands are about a foot and a half apart. More dirt falls in front of me, some of it hitting my head. I can’t leave the entrance. I look toward the wall straight across from me, the one with the knife blade sticking out of it. It’s crumbling.
“That’s how the first one started,” Bobby says in monotone.
The man, who had been lying motionless for a few seconds, suddenly draws his knee back and thrusts his foot at me.
I check block his lower leg with my forearm and grab his foot with one hand. We do a tug-of-war for a moment while I squirm onto my side to free my other arm. Now I’m gripping his foot with both hands, one on the toe end, the other on his heel.
My mind leaps to a bad traffic accident I covered while in uniform, in which the passenger was killed and the driver was pinned in, his lower leg caught in a tangle of twisted metal under the dash. When we finally extracted it, his mangled foot spun two fast revolutions like a small propeller.
I know I can’t twist his foot around twice, but I can crank it with all the strength I have left.
Man, this guy’s screams are getting annoying.
I pull his broken ankle and the rest of him toward me. He’s too weak and distracted to fight it, and there is nothing for him to grab hold of.
“Bobby,” I say, pushing the man’s leg toward him. I let go of his foot and grab his upper thigh so he doesn’t retract his leg. “Grab his calf and use it to pull yourself out.”
The dirt is still sliding toward the boy, faster now than it was a minute ago. It’s nearing the top of his thigh.
Bobby grabs the leg easily and pulls on it. Nothing happens.
“I can’t budge, Sam. The dirt is so heavy.”
It’s probably the side pressure of the moving earth that’s pinning him.
“Listen to me. Hug his leg as hard as you can. Concentrate on just your right leg. Okay? Don’t try to bend it because that pushes your knee against the dirt. Lean to your left and pull your leg straight up. Lift with your hip and push up with your toes. Put your mind into it and all those taekwondo trained hip muscles.”
“Okay, Sam,” he says, tears streaming over his cheeks.
The crack on the opposite wall has widened and dirt is beginning to pour through it like water through a broken pipe.
“What’s with the weenie voice, man? You’re a black belt. You’re a warrior. If you go down in here, I’m going down with you. You got to save me and I got to save you.” I look at the man writhing in pain from any one of his many injuries. “And we might as well save this dumb shit.”
Bobby laughs, part of it a sob.
“In fact,” I say. “Our friend here is going to help. You Ready?”
“Yeah.”
“YOU READY?”
“YES!”
“Then PULL. That’s it. Hold on tight to his leg and pull your leg up with all your heart, mind, and body.”
I grab the man’s crotch with all five fingers and crush what was wounded from Bobby’s earlier punch. He squeals and, as I’d hoped, reflexively yanks his leg back. Coupled with Bobby’s effort, that pulls the boy’s leg out of the dirt, minus his sandal.
I extend my hand to him. “See if you can reach my…” We clasp hands. “Gotcha! Come on now, pull with both arms.”
“Ow! Sam, don’t pull me against my knee joint. Let me pull on you.”
“Okay. I’m here. Pull.”
The crack in the far wall splits open about a foot, dropping apple-sized dirt clods and stones into the room, then a fast stream of chunky earth.
“Pull, Bobby. Come on, pull.”
The boy’s body trembles with the exertion until finally his left leg is free. He lies face down on the dirt, his chest heaving.
The top half of the far wall collapses inward, spilling dirt and stones into the left half of the room and over the moaning man. He sits part way up, shakes the dirt from his face, and looks toward me and the tunnel.
“Bobby, focus. We got to get out of here, now.”
The left wall, where it meets the back one, caves in, covering the man up to his waist. The light bulb that had been somehow attached to the wall is now protruding half way out of the mound of dirt, still casting its sickly yellow light. It won’t be long until it’s covered and we’re in total darkness.
Dirt begins trickling down onto my head from the three-foot span of wall overhead. I can’t chance crawling out of the tunnel, turning around, and going back in head first. If a mass of dirt were to fall and cover the tunnel entryway, we’d be stuck in the room.
I’ll have to crawl through the tunnel backwards.
“Get in here, now,” I say, fighting to control my voice, and my mind.
Bobby low crawls toward me as I back in, once again inch-worming my body and pushing with my hands. The last thing I see before his body blocks my view is the rest of the left wall caving in, the sudden weight of the dirt pushing the sitting man forward as if he were trying to touch his knees with his nose. Actually, he does.
“Tell him to follow us,” I say, as Bobby ducks his head into the tunnel.
He leans back out and gets out a couple of words before dirt begins dropping down on his head from the wall above.
“Let’s move,” I say, scooting back as fast as I can, which isn’t fast at all.
“Dirt’s falling on my legs!” Bobby screams, his panicked face nearly touching mine, his eyes huge with terror. “Crawl faster, Sam. I don’t want it to trap me.”
“This is my max,” I say, my stomach cramping from the strain on my core.
“My leg” Bobby snaps his head around to look back. “The guy is grabbing my leg. His hand—it’s reaching out of the dirt!”
“Kick it with your other one.”
He’s grunts with each blow. “Okay, I’m free.”
The only sound now is our ragged breathing and our bodies scooting on the earthen floor. The boy and I are nose to nose, our breath hot. He bangs his head into mine so hard that I see sparks in the dark.
“I can only go so fast,” I say irritably. “Don’t—”
Whoooosh!
Silence from the room.
“What was that?” Bobby says, turning his head to look behind him. His forehead hits the wall and dirt crumbles onto his hands. “It’s all dark in there now.”
Probably the last of the walls spilling into the room, filling it.
“Just keep crawling, Son. Focus on crawling. Focus.”
That’s what I’ve got to do too. Focus on inching my torso and pushing with my hands. Oh man, the cement burns on my chest and gut hurt. The too-small shirt I was given is bunched up around my armpits and the bandages Mai applied have long since been torn away. I’m guessing that this foul dirt doesn’t have healing properties. Oh well, an infection is the least of my problems right now.
Suddenly, I can’t get enough air.
Panic surges through my body, and I want to push myself up through six feet of hard-packed dirt and run around that beautiful yard screaming and sucking in air.
You got enough air, I tell myself. It’s a lie, but I force the thought into my mind anyway.
“That man’s dead, isn’t he?” Bobby says in a small voice. We’re nose to nose.
“Think how good that fresh air up top is going to taste, Bobby. Better than a chocolate shake, burger, fries, or anything you’ve ever had. Keep moving. We have only about six feet to go.” I think it’s farther but lying to him is the best option right now.
“I can do this,” he says, more to himself than to me. “Okay. Yeah, okay. I can do this.”
“If you can do it, I can. If I can do it, you can.”
“That’s kinda dumb, Sam.”
“What did you expect, Shakespeare? We’re underground in a friggin’ hole.”
Bobby suddenly lunges forward banging his head into my cheekbone.
“Aggh!” My eyes scrunch shut against the pain.
“Something’s on my legs,” he whispers.
I open them. “What do you mean—”
“Dirt. I think it’s dirt. Why is there dirt falling on my… OhGodohGodohGod! Back up faster, Sam. I think the tunnel starting to…”
I can hear it now. It’s coming from behind the boy. Like flour through a sifter. A gentle deadly whisper, following us.
Dull light from the tunnel’s entrance finds it’s way to barely illuminate Bobby’s perspiring face and his terrified eyes. Snot curls over his top lip.
“The tunnel is caving in behind me,” he manages.
My midsection is starting to cramp from doing the inchworm thing, cramping bad. I try to push back without raising and lowering my hips, but my triceps are on fire and they’re starting to cramp. I pause.
“What are you doing?” Bobby says desperately, his forehead against mine.
It’s not the time or place to give him a talk about lactic acid build up. “I need five seconds to… just… Okay, I’m good.”
I’m pushing and inching again. I try to look back to see how far we are from the opening, but I can’t turn my head far enough.
“How far are we?” I ask. “Can you see?”
Bobby strains to look around my shoulder. “From your feet? Maybe five or six feet.” He looks at me for a second, the wheels in his head turning. “How you going to get out? You can’t turn around.”
Good question. It was hard enough squishing myself small enough to get in head first, and I still scraped my back on the tunnel opening. But to climb out backwards?
Bobby’s eyes widen. “Sam?”
I heard it. More sifting.
“It’s falling on my butt,” he says, his jaw quivering. “It’s catching up to us.”
I push back hard. There’s more light now and I can see the panic on Bobby’s face in full HD. I’m trying hard not to let it show on mine. Getting whiffs of fresh air now. It’s wonderful, invigorating. I want more.
Dirt drops from the ceiling onto the boy’s mid back.
His eyes lock on mine, trance-like. He pulls himself forward until his face is squished against my shoulder. Still, he keeps trying to move forward.
“Bobby.”
Nothing.
“Bobby, look at me. Hey! Look—At—Me.” He does. I push back to give him space. “Keep pulling.” He follows. “That’s it. Good. Excellent.” I push back another couple inches. “Now do it again.” He follows. “When is your birthday? When will you be eighteen?”
He looks at me as if I’d lost my mind, which I have a little. “My birthday?”
Cool air on my feet. “Yeah, birthday. Cake. Ice cream. A clown with a red nose. Eighteen.”
I push back.
“I’ll be seventeen this August, so I will be eighteen on August thirty-first of next year. Why?”
He follows.
“You’ll be an adult then. If your parents haven’t beaten you to death over this trip of yours, I’m inviting you to come up to Portland to visit me. Stay for a few weeks and I’ll train you.”
I push back.
His face brightens. “Really? That would be so—”
Dirt pours down on his upper back and shoulders.
Bobby screams. “Noooo!”
I can feel the bottom rung of the ladder with the toe of my shoe, which means my legs from my knees on down are out of the tunnel. I try to come up on my knees but my butt hits the ceiling. Dirt drops onto me. The boy’s forehead is pressing into mine again. Dirt rains over his terrified face and bounces into my mouth. Behind him, blackness. The tunnel is gone except for the space we’re occupying—and it’s filling fast.
“Stay with me, Son,” I say against his cheek. “We’re getting out of this. My feet are on the first rung… now the second rung. Stay close to me. There will be lots of good air in a few seconds.”
My lower body is off the ground now and my feet are on the third or forth rung from the bottom. Already trashed from the hard pushing, my triceps are spasming. My stomach is cramping again and a knot is forming in my lower back.
Can’t think of those things now. Got to focus on the motion of walking up the ladder backwards and supporting my weight on my quivering arms. Tex would be great at this.
Dirt pours down on Bobby’s head. His legs are completely submerged and he hasn’t moved his arms in about ten seconds. Hopefully, it’s just a bit of loose soil that’s covering him and not the full weight of the earth above. He shakes his head as if surfacing in a swimming pool.
Supporting most of my weight on my quivering right arm, I push my left hand into the dirt to find his. Got it. “Grip my hand. Yes, like that. Now pull on it and dig with your toes. You’ve got to move forward. Good, good. You’re moving now. Fight for it, Son. Fight!”
The strain on my core is almost more than I can bear. Bobby’s extra weight, and the weight of the dirt piling up on him is too much. My legs and body are at a forty-five degree angle now, my head almost out of the tunnel. My gut, legs, and arms are spasming. I’m not sure which is going to give out first.
No no no. That’s not going to happen. I will ascend. Keep climbing with my feet. Keep hand walking backwards. Keep pulling the boy. Keep on, keepin’ on.
Bobby’s head clears the tunnel, but the rest of him is under dirt. And it’s still falling on him. Still sifting. Sifting. Siiiiift.
Like sand through an hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
A voice-over would say that at the beginning of a soap opera my mother used to watch. Can’t remember the name of it.
Will the vertical hole collapse? It shouldn’t but I don’t know.
“I’m stuck, Sam,” Bobby says, unable to raise his head any higher than my trembling arms that are supporting nearly all my weight. “There’s so much dirt on me.”
I slip one foot over what has to be the highest rung then my other foot. Blood floods into my head fast and furious, my ears roaring like I’m in a subway station.
“Grab my other wrist, Bobby,” I say. My voice sounds like I’m underwater. I press my palms into the ground to stabilize my arms. “Yes, that’s good. Now pull as hard as you can and wiggle your body like a snake.”
He jerks so hard on my left arm that my left foot slips off the rung. For a second, I think my right might slip off, but somehow it maintains its purchase. I can’t reconnect my left to the rung because I’m hanging too far to the right. Fortunately, I’m still supporting most of my weight on my hands. Got to stay strong. If my arms give out—and it’s getting close to that—I’ll crumple into a pile on top of the boy.
How long can a person hang upside down before they pass out? Anyone ever ask an opossum? My left arm is shaking bad, real bad. I can’t… Oh man! I can’t… my right foot is slipping off…
A hand grips my loose, left ankle. Another grips my right one. I twist my body to look up and while I can’t turn enough to see him, I know it’s got to be Dung. Who else? Dung! He likes me. He really, really likes me.
I grip Bobby’s wrists as hard as I can. “Hold on, Son. Hold on with all that you’ve got. You’re getting out.”
Dung’s grip on my ankles is crushing, but I don’t care. Bobby finally breaks free of the dirt and hangs from my wrist as big Dung pulls us out of what was about to be our grave.
“Mai friend me,” the big man grumbles, as I float upward. “Not friend you.”