Over and Under Read Online Free Page B

given up. His shoes twisted and twitched. The crack, I noticed, was barely as high as one of his shoes. One of those shoes came off, then the other, and he continued the struggle in just his socks.
    I fought harder to move, completely unsuccessfully, and the frustration allowed me to completely give in to the fear. I could move my arms, and kick my feet about an inch up and down, so I did both as fast as I could in a kind of swimming motion that I couldn’t stop once I started. In my panic, I actually wondered how long it would take me to shrink a little, how many days might pass before I starved enough to slide freely backward the way we came in. Long before then, I knew, my flashlight would die, and I would somehow have to remember which direction to crawl in the total darkness. As I flailed, sweat combined with the dirt and stung hard as it dripped into my eyes.
    I stopped long enough to rub my eyes. I noticed then that Tom wasn’t thrashing. He was digging his toes into the dirt and pushing in a very deliberate, determined way. It was hard to see at first, but he was moving infinitesimally forward. The motion was almost imperceptible because his denim shorts remained in place—Tom was pushing himself right out of his Wranglers. I watched as his feet went up inside the legs and disappeared and the shorts collapsed, as if Tom had wanted out of the crack so badly that he had willed himself into vapor. His dimensions reduced by the thickness of one ply of well-worn denim, he shot forward, past the range of my flashlight’s beam.
    “Got it!” I heard him say at the other side. By the echo and the strength of his voice, I could tell he was in a chamber large enough to stand in upright. I didn’t shout for Tom to come back and help me. There was no possibility that he wouldn’t.
    He crawled back to me without his flashlight so that his hands would be free. I saw his white face like a rising moon when he came within range of mine. He stuck out both hands, and I let go of my flashlight to grab them. With a hard yank, Tom pulled me forward. I tumbled out of the crack, leaving behind in the crevice my flashlight, as well as Tom’s shorts and shoes.
    I took in the new room where we found ourselves, my senses heightened by the receding panic. Tom had left his flashlight sitting on a ledge in the chamber, pointing more or less at the crack that almost swallowed us forever. The walls of the new chamber were high and smooth. Inviting paths led out from two sides. The packed-down dirt made them look oddly well-traveled.
    “Holy shit,” said Tom, as we slapped the dirt off ourselves. It was the peculiar bright orange mud that was characteristic of our local caves. We were coated in the stuff from head to toe.
    “That sucked,” I said, trying to sound unfazed.
    Tom moved across the chamber, to where the crack entered at the other end. “I wonder if there’s a better way through,” he said, eyeing the length of it across the wall. I remained silent in a way that let him know I had no intention of crawling into that crack ever again. “It looks wider over here,” he said.
    “Not to me.”
    Suddenly Tom heard something I didn’t. “What was that?” he whispered.
    A moment later, a dozen smiling, jabbering tourists rounded the corner, led by a man in the faux park ranger’s shirt and wide-brimmed hat of the Squire Boone tour guide. As they came into view, hidden electric lights clicked on, dramatically underlighting the chamber’s formations in garish green and blue. The guide was walking backward, talking to the group, so the paying customers saw us before he did: two filthy, orange boys squinting at the light, one of them wearing nothing but his Fruit-of-the-Looms.
    The guide turned to face us and there was a split second when we all just stared at one another. Then Tom and I sprinted directly toward them as the group eagerly parted.
    We hauled ass down the well-lit tour path. Ahead of us we heard the squawk of someone