Friend of My Youth

operating—he stalled, tried for a little power and got a surge that lifted him, so that he saw the rock ceiling closing down on him like a lid. He ducked, the cage halted, a rocky outcrop struck him in the back.
    He had worked in the mine for seven years before that and hardly ever spoke to Brenda about what it was like. Now he tells her. It’s a world of its own, he says—caverns and pillars, miles out under the lake. If you get in a passage where there are no machines to light the gray walls, the salt-dusty air, and you turn your headlamp off, you can find out what real darkness is like, the darkness people on the surface of the earth never get to see. The machines stay down there forever. Some are assembled down there, taken down in parts; all are repaired there; and finally they’re ransacked for usable parts, then piled into a dead-end passage that is sealed up—a tomb for these underground machines. They make a ferocious noise all the time they’re working; the noise of the machines and the ventilating fans cuts out any human voice. And now there’s a new machine that can do what Cornelius went up in the cage to do. It can do it by itself, without a man.
    Brenda doesn’t know if he misses being down there. He sayshe doesn’t. He says he just can’t look at the surface of the water without seeing all that underneath, which nobody who hasn’t seen it could imagine.
    Neil and Brenda drive along under the trees, where suddenly you could hardly feel the wind at all.
    “Also, I did take some money,” Neil says. “I got forty dollars, which, compared to what some guys got, was just nothing. I swear that’s all, forty dollars. I never got any more.”
    She doesn’t say anything.
    “I wasn’t looking to confess it,” he says. “I just wanted to talk about it. Then what pisses me off is I lied anyway.”
    Now that she can hear his voice better, she notices that it’s nearly as flat and tired as her own. She sees his hands on the wheel and thinks what a hard time she would have describing what he looks like. At a distance—in the car, waiting for her—he’s always been a bright blur, his presence a relief and a promise. Close up, he’s been certain separate areas—silky or toughened skin, wiry hair or shaved prickles, smells that are unique or shared with other men. But it’s chiefly an energy, a quality of his self that she can see in his blunt, short fingers or the tanned curve of his forehead. And even to call it energy is not exact—it’s more like the sap of him, rising from the roots, clear and on the move, filling him to bursting. That’s what she has set herself to follow—the sap, the current, under the skin, as if that were the one true thing.
    If she turned sideways now, she would see him for what he is—that tanned curved forehead, the receding fringe of curly brown hair, heavy eyebrows with a few gray hairs in them, deep-set light-colored eyes, and a mouth that enjoys itself, rather sulky and proud. A boyish man beginning to age—though he still feels light and wild on top of her, after Cornelius’s bulk settling down possessively, like a ton of blankets. A responsibility, Brenda feels then. Is she going to feel the same about this one?
    Neil turns the car around, he points it ready to drive back, and it’s time for her to get out and go across to the van. He takes his hands off the wheel with the engine running, flexes his fingers, then grabs the wheel hard again—hard enough, you’d think, to squeeze it to pulp. “Christ, don’t get out yet!” he says. “Don’t get out of the car!”
    She hasn’t even put a hand on the door, she hasn’t made a move to leave. Doesn’t he know what’s happening? Maybe you need the experience of a lot of married fights to know it. To know that what you think—and, for a while, hope—is the absolute end for you can turn out to be only the start of a new stage, a continuation. That’s what’s happening, that’s what has happened. He has lost some of his sheen for her; he may not get it back. Probably the same goes for her, with him. She feels his heaviness and anger and surprise. She feels that also in herself. She thinks that up till now was easy.

Meneseteung

    I
    Columbine, bloodroot
,
    And wild bergamot
,
    Gathering armfuls
,
    Giddily we go
.
    Offerings
the book is called. Gold lettering on a dull-blue cover. The author’s full name underneath: Almeda Joynt Roth. The local paper, the
Vidette
, referred to her as “our