The Edge of Everything(35)

"Crush, crush, crush?" said Zoe.

"That was feeble," said Dallas. "Nothing was ever crushed by anybody who said 'crush' like that."

"It's not just the cave," said Zoe.

Dallas frowned.

"Do you want to-do you want to talk about your feelings, or whatever?"

Zoe just stared at him. She couldn't help it. It was the last thing that the Dallas she'd gone out with would ever have asked.

"Have you been practicing how to talk to girls, dawg?" she said.

"Maybe," said Dallas. "Maybe with my mom-who's a therapist. I'm saying maybe."

"Well, it's sweet of you to ask," said Zoe. "But I know you don't actually want to hear about my feelings."

They came to a narrow curve in the road. Another car was approaching. Dallas slowed down and drove onto the shoulder so it could pass.

"Here's the thing that girls don't understand," he said.

"Oh my god," said Zoe. "Please tell me what girls don't understand-because I've always wondered."

Either Dallas didn't hear the sarcasm, or decided to ignore it.

"What girls don't understand," he began earnestly, "is that guys actually do want to hear about their feelings-they just don't want to hear about all of their feelings. They want to hear about some of them."

"How much are we talking?" said Zoe. "Do you want to hear, like, thirty percent of our feelings?"

Dallas mulled this over.

"Maybe fifty percent?" he said. "Depending? We just want there to be time left at the end to talk about something else. But with you guys-with you girls-everything is always connected to everything else, so you start talking about one feeling and that leads to another feeling, which leads to another feeling." He looked at her with his dimpled, wide-open face. He was absolutely sincere. "You know? There's never any time left."

They were just outside Polebridge now. Dallas turned onto the road to town. Polebridge was a tiny, pony express sort of place in the middle of nowhere. There were maybe a dozen buildings-a café, a general store, a cluster of cabins, a red outhouse with a crescent moon on the door. Except for the satellite dishes, it might have been 1912. There was a rail for tying up your horse.

Dallas parked in front of the store, shut off the engine, and turned to Zoe, apparently still waiting for the lowdown on her feelings. 

What the heck, she thought.

"Okay, here are the highlights," she said. "My mom's pissed at me for going caving. Jonah won't leave the house. He's like a crazy person in a play. I haven't seen X-my boyfriend-I haven't seen him in days. I'm sorry. I know you don't want to hear about him. What else? I miss my dad. I've never gone caving without him. I don't even know how to go caving without him." She made herself stop talking. "So those are my feelings. Which fifty percent do you want to hear more about?"

To Dallas's credit, he said exactly the right thing: "You need some sugar."

He disappeared into the general store and returned five minutes later with a bag of pastries, which he dumped onto the seat between them, like a pirate's treasure. There were chocolate chip cookies, cherry turnovers, and huckleberry bear claws. It was far more food than the two of them could eat. Zoe unwrapped a bear claw and began to devour it, licking the frosting off her fingers. She hadn't realized how hungry she was.

"When we're finished with Silver Teardrop, I want to go see Black Teardrop, okay?" she said. "I haven't seen it since … "

She trailed off, and Dallas finished the sentence for her: "Since we looked for your dad?"

"Yeah," she said.

"You really ready to see that place again?" said Dallas.

Zoe laughed. She wasn't sure why. Maybe it was the sugar.

"Who knows," she said.



They left Polebridge and drove the last ten miles to Silver Teardrop, the car bucking and rattling over the road. The forest in this part of the mountains had recently burned. The trees were stripped and charcoal black, and rose out of the snow naked as needles. They reminded Zoe of the woods near Bert and Betty's house, of course-and that reminded her of chasing Jonah and the dogs through the blizzard, of meeting X, of meeting Stan. It was just like Dallas said: everything was connected.

Silver Teardrop lay under a frozen creek bed that ran alongside the road. There was nowhere to park. Dallas drove an extra half mile, and finally the road widened enough for him to pull over. For the next five minutes, he blared Kanye West's song "Monster" at top volume, which seemed to be a pre-caving ritual of his. Zoe stood outside the truck, watching in amusement as Dallas duplicated every move from the video. Finally, the tune ended. Dallas emerged from the truck, red-faced and beaming.

"Woot!" he shouted, not so much to Zoe as to the universe.

He gestured for Zoe to follow him. He walked to the back of the 4Runner and opened it with a flourish.

"Behold!" he said.

Zoe couldn't speak for a moment: It was a gearhead's paradise. There were beautiful coils of rope hanging from hooks. There were drills, bolt kits, harnesses, ascenders and descenders, caving packs with holes in the bottom so water could drain out. There were folding shovels and gleaming ice axes. There were whole unopened boxes of Clif Bars and CamelBaks full of water. Everything was meticulously curated and cared for. Everything was shiny. Zoe's dad always used as little gear as he could get away with: he liked to improvise, and he was kind of a slob. Dallas had four identical orange helmets. He even had a stack of jumpsuits, which were a lighter shade of orange. They appeared to have been ironed.

"Turns out I have a little OCD," said Dallas.

Zoe didn't want him to feel self-conscious.

"No more than, like, a serial killer," she said.

Dallas took a jumpsuit from the pile, popped it open, and stepped into it. The suit used to have a breast pocket, but Dallas had removed it so it wouldn't fill with mud when he crawled. The front of the suit had tiny holes in the shape of a U where the pocket used to be.



       
         
       
        

Next, Dallas inspected the row of helmets. Zoe wondered how he could even tell them apart. Finally, he picked one, rigged it with an LED headlamp, and strapped it on. He was square-jawed and handsome in his orange helmet-and-suit ensemble.

"How do I look?" he said.

"Like a Lego," said Zoe.

She put on her own jumpsuit, which had been crushed in a ball at the bottom of her duffle. It was off-white, and so stained with mud that it looked like an abstract painting. Her helmet came next. Her dad had given it to her when she turned 15. It was dark blue, and scarred from low ceilings and falling rock. It was slightly too big and poorly padded. Whenever she nodded, it did a dance on her head.

For ten minutes, Dallas and Zoe geared up. Everything Dallas owned seemed to have been scientifically engineered-even his gloves looked like something you'd use to repair a space station. Zoe's stuff was all shabby crap from the land of misfit clothes. But Dallas didn't judge her, and she didn't embarrass easily, anyway. She pulled on her yellow dish-washing gloves like they were made of silk.

Zoe and Dallas double-checked their headlamps, their batteries, their backup batteries, their drill. Dallas got pissed when he realized that he'd forgotten to bring walkie-talkies. Fortunately, Zoe had thought to pack a pair. She dug them out of her duffel, and handed him one.

"Please come prepared next time," she said.

Dallas locked up the 4Runner-cheep! cheep!-and they hiked back down the road, trudging along stiffly under all the layers of clothes. After a few minutes, they came around a bend and saw some deer in the snow up ahead. The deer's eyes were wet and nervous. Their coats, thin and red in summer, had turned coarse and gray to survive the cold-and hunting season. They stared at Dallas and Zoe, then darted away, jumping high like horses on a carousel.



In the silence, Zoe's anxiety began to seep back in. She tried to clear her mind, but couldn't. A story her dad had told her when she was 10 or 11 came back to her and the minute she remembered it, she couldn't shake it. The story was about British cavers in the '60s who got caught underground when a freak thunderstorm flooded their cave.

She'd never forgotten the details: Rescuers came running from their pubs. They built a dam, but it kept collapsing so they had to hold it together with their bodies. They worked through the night to pump out the water. Finally, they wriggled into a small tunnel to search for survivors. Deep in the cave, the lead rescuer found the bodies of two dead cavers blocking the way. He had to crawl over them to find the others. They were just corpses now, too. The last of them had squeezed into a tight fissure in a desperate hunt for air. The lead rescuer began his retreat, knowing all was lost. The volunteers behind him were crying and throwing up in the passageway. He said to the first one he saw, "Go back, Jim. They're dead." 

Dallas noticed that Zoe wasn't talking.

"What are you thinking about?" he said.

"The British cavers," she said.

"The dead guys in the tunnel-those British cavers?" he said. There wasn't a caving legend that Dallas didn't know. "That's a horrible thing to think about, dawg. Hit Delete right now. Seriously."