They were all quiet at the conductor’s courage. He was looking at the man with his rearview mirror. The woman next to Karel took out a handkerchief and gestured toward the blood. She said, to break the silence, that it was terrible what these people thought they could get away with.
Halfway up a hill the conductor stopped the trolley. They could hear sirens and honking behind them. The young man scrambled out and disappeared between two houses.
So Karel never got to the application office. All the passengers were loaded onto another bus and driven to the local police station, where they waited to be interviewed. The trolley conductor disappeared. The woman who’d been next to Karel said, “This is terrible. This is an outrage,” while they waited. Karel was interviewed next to last — naturally, he thought — by a beefy sergeant tired of the whole business whose interrogation lasted all of four or five minutes. The sergeant asked Karel what he saw, and Karel told him. The sergeant asked if the man had any confederates, and Karel said no. The sergeant asked if he could describe the man, and Karel said truthfully he hadn’t seen him too clearly. The sergeant frowned, his pencil making edgy little anticipatory lines on a pad, and told him he could go.
By the time he reached the application office it was closed and he’d missed the last bus besides. He got a long and meandering ride home on the front of a manure truck, holding his breath futilely and swatting at flies even after it was too dark to see.
The next morning he went over Leda’s to tell her the story. Mrs. Schiele told him that Leda was busy. He could wait in the living room. She sat opposite him with a great exhalation, as though she believed it was her unhappy job to entertain him until he drifted away from boredom. She gazed at the piano, a small black upright polished and shiny with disuse. “Do you play?” she asked, though the question seemed ridiculous. She said she once had, and left the rest to his imagination. She indicated her hands — arthritis? he wondered — and rubbed her knuckles as if to remind herself of the pain.
“What an artist the world lost,” Leda said impatiently, coming into the room to flounce herself down on the fat green chair opposite him.
Her mother sniffed. “I tried to get my daughter to carry on, to have a little—”
“Oh, stop,” Leda said. “So what’s the news?”
Karel told her about the trolley. Mrs. Schiele was looking at him, and he realized he had a dirty arm on a lace doily that looked to be a hundred-year-old family heirloom or something.
Leda was appalled. She said that this was the kind of thing that everyone was supposed to be patient about. The NUP was always asking for patience while it consolidated its position and ferreted out those working against the unity of the country.
Her mother tsked.
“I don’t know what I would have done,” Leda said. “These people are such pigs!”
“Leda!” her mother said.
Leda put her hand to her forehead. She said, “What they get away with is so outrageous it makes me want to scream.”
Karel winced. She was too loud. He felt cowardly, ready to agree with anything to win her over.
Her mother got up and looked ready to leave the room. “Miss Politics,” she said. “Fifteen years old and she knows better than everybody else.”
“I do,” Leda said with some vehemence.
“So when you’re old enough you be Praetor,” her mother said.
“When I’m old enough I’ll help throw all them out,” Leda muttered.
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” her mother said vaguely. She rubbed her eyes with both hands and sighed.
“You’re scared of everything,” Leda said. “Daddy’s ghost, this place, everyone around us.”
They were quiet. Karel felt intensely uncomfortable, and politically too ignorant to know what he should be arguing.
“You listen to rumors,” Leda’s mother said. “This party’s like the rest. You don’t remember things before.”
“I know,” Leda said with that sarcastic look she had. “I’m too young for things.”
“Why do you always twist my words?” her mother demanded.
Leda was silent.
Her mother rubbed her knuckles and the back of her hand. She was still standing in the middle of the room. She said, “You talk about border troubles and things you hear about. I’m talking about things I see, things like more jobs and less fighting and not a new government every ten minutes, things like that.”
“I can’t talk to you,” Leda said, as if announcing the weather.
They sat quietly, Karel surrendering his hope of an invitation to lunch.
“They say in their own Party program, which they even published, what they’re going to do,” Leda said, sadly. “Twenty-five points.”
“Who reads programs? Do you read programs?” Mrs. Schiele asked Karel. He shook his head. “The National Unity Party is something new,” she said. “That’s all it is.”
“Well,” Karel said, standing.
“What about all the troubles, all the beatings, the people who are missing?” Leda said. “You think it’s just foreigners it happens to?”
“I think troublemakers who won’t mind their own business are getting into trouble,” her mother said sharply. “You leave trouble to the police.”
“You’re an idiot,” Leda said.
“Leda,” her mother said.
“I’m sorry,” Leda said, frustrated. “You’re awfully quiet,” she told Karel.
“Oh, leave the poor boy alone,” her mother said, working into an anger. “You have to badger him as well?”
“Do I badger you?” Leda asked.
Karel shook his head, his mouth half-closed.
“There,” Leda said, without triumph. “See?”
“There’s no sense arguing with you when you’re being impossible,” her mother said stiffly. She left the room.
“So don’t,” Leda called after her.
“You’ll just disagree with whatever I say,” her mother said from the kitchen.
“So test me,” Leda said. “Tell me the NUP are idiots.”
“I don’t like you using that word!” her mother yelled. She was standing in the doorway, brandishing a large stirring spoon.
Leda quieted, frightened. Her mother left the doorway.
Karel cleared his throat. He put his palms together in front of his mouth.
Leda swung her legs around and hauled herself from the chair and suggested a walk. “We’re going to go get into trouble, Mom,” she called from the front step, and then shut the door behind her when her mother didn’t answer.
On the walk Karel asked about Nicholas, to change the subject.
“That’s one good thing,” Leda said. “The NUP says too much aid goes to places like mental institutions. Naturally. They probably all escaped from one. I’m hoping they’ll just abolish the whole thing and send him home.”
“Where do you read all this stuff?” Karel asked. Leda shot him a look, and he didn’t pursue it. “You don’t like Nicholas’s … place, huh?” he said instead. “I thought they teach them skills and things.”
“I’ll tell you what the kids learn,” Leda said. “They learn to clean filthy things. They learn to sweep. Sometimes to count. I asked Nicholas once what he was learning and he said he was learning to be quiet.”
Karel nodded sympathetically, chagrined that this topic too had exploded. He hadn’t had any idea things were that bad there.
“I don’t know whether to cry or hit people when I go there,” she said. “It’s so terrible.”
“I’ll go with you next time,” he offered. Another, shadow part of him said, Are you out of your mind?
“You want to?” Leda asked, and stopped, and looked at him closely. “Thanks,” she said, and squeezed his arm. “That’s nice.”
He was pleased with the squeeze and nursed the feeling for a while.
They continued walking, and he asked where they were going. Leda said the cave with the bats. Did he know about it? She’d show him.
How did she know about it? Karel asked. She said David had taken her.
The sky was red and violet in streaks. He walked along thinking of the endless number of things in this town he knew nothing about. Leda stopped opposite a shallow-looking niche in an exposed rock formation. She said, “It’s late. But we won’t go far.” She sat on the ground and then lay back and edged sideways into the niche. She disappeared.
“Come on,” she called, her voice muffled. There was some scraping. Karel sank to his hands and knees and saw a much darker slot deep in the niche, through which the top of her head bobbed. He crawled in, trying to stay low, and banged his shoulder on the rock. His exclamation of pain echoed around him. At the slot he slid over sideways and his legs tumbled down onto Leda shoulders, and he apologized until she said it was okay, already.
They settled themselves in a black oblique space as big as a car backseat. He was excited at being this close to her. She was moving stones. He spread both hands on the dark rock around him and said something inadequate to express his enthusiasm. This was amazing. She was a girl. She said, “This part’s narrow,” and started in feet first on her back, using her elbows on the sloping sandy floor of the tunnel. With everything but her head and shoulders in, she hesitated, and twisted around to look back at him. “You sure you want to do this?” she asked. “You won’t be scared? The bats if you see them are pretty ugly.”
Karel made a dismissive spitting sound. He asked her if she wanted him to go first. She shook her head and slipped into the darkness, making a light scraping noise. It reminded him of a shovel being drawn over sandy soil.
He eased himself into the hole feet first when he judged her far enough ahead. It was cold on his back, and he took a last look through the entrance up at the sky, already deep blue in the twilight, and then began edging downward.
He could just make out the rock face, three or four inches over his. He could raise his head only a little, and couldn’t see over his feet down into the darkness anyway. He thought of scorpions and heavy bird spiders, and the back of his neck prickled. How was it she wasn’t scared? “Hey,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. “Hey.” He stopped.
There was a rustling ahead and then silence. “What?” Leda said.
“How are we going to see anything?” he asked.
“I’ve got a candle,” Leda said. Karel could hear her crawling again.
He scrabbled downward for minutes, trying to estimate the distance they were traveling, his rear and elbows thumping along. He wondered what sort of reptiles they might come across. Some skinks, some blind lizards, the sort of translucent, helpless-looking things he saw in books. It was stupid, he supposed, to just climb into places like this, but then he told himself that if Leda knew about it, it must be pretty well traveled. He kept crawling, not very reassured. He thought about finding and bringing back a new species of something, docile and unique. He thought he should have brought his hoop snare and specimen bag. He passed a part of the wall that was dripping, and he felt colder. He could smell guano. He hoped that that wasn’t what he was feeling along the walls and floor. “Yick,” Leda said, ahead of him.
He bumped his tailbone painfully on a ridgelike rise. He stopped, easing down off his elbows and lying flat on his back.
“Hey,” he said again. He could feel cold air sweeping up from below, over him.
“What?” Leda said, a little exasperated. She was much farther ahead.
“How much farther is this?” he asked.
“We can go back if you want,” Leda said. The guano smell was much stronger. Then she said, “You hear that?” Her voice came up the shaft like a whisper.
He stopped and rubbed his lower back, chilled. He craned his head up as far as he could and looked over his feet down into the darkness. He listened.
“What is that?” Leda asked. Karel couldn’t hear anything. He strained, frightened. He began to pick up the faintest puffs, bursts of air, chuffings, like someone in a distant room displacing air with sheets of paper. There was a scratching, and Leda lit her candle and the yellow glow radiated up the circular tunnel. Karel could see his feet and Leda’s head, and her hand cradling the flame. The walls around him were covered with long sheetlike stretches of guano. He groaned.
“It’s the bats,” Leda said, and one spiraled up the tunnel with supernatural finesse, planing over her head and looping and undulating right over Karel with a whispery sound, its tiny black eyes glittering.
He was going to remark on that, delighted, when down the tunnel a huge wind seemed to be building, and Leda gave a cry. Another bat fluttered by, faster, like some black, wrinkled fruit, and he looked down and the roaring grew louder and the bat shapes exploded out from below the darkness, extinguishing Leda’s candle and filling the tunnel top to bottom and roaring all around them. He jerked back and crossed his hands over his face. They were a torrent, unbearably thick and furious in the darkness, colliding with the walls, the ceiling, his head, rocketing and pinballing by and landing on him everywhere, piling up in confusion below his feet, climbing him awkwardly, stumbling as others buffeted them from behind. He felt them squirming into his pants legs and he shrieked and thrashed. The crawlers were reaching his head and arms, fighting for position and leaping into flight, tensing their little claws on his forehead and ears, propelled by his violent twisting. His cheeks were brushed and swept with fur and leathery flapping, and he revolted, turning left and right, slapping and clawing at his face. He could hear even through the din Leda’s sobbing. He tried to get to her and couldn’t. He turned his face to the rock and tried to submit, but they didn’t let up, and he was suffocated by the smell and the sound and the overwhelming feeling of being crawled on everywhere, and he cried out for her and for help and wanted to bang his head against the rock wall until it stopped, and he stamped and kicked the walls and scraped his hands until finally, suddenly, they began to subside. He could hear again, the volume dropping steadily, and then there were only a few stragglers flitting by, or laboring up his shirt front. He beat them off, hurting himself with his violence. They made tiny squeals.
Leda was still sobbing. He shivered and shook and furiously scratched and rubbed himself. He crawled down to her and tapped her with his foot, to reassure her, and she shrieked and started crying again. He rested a foot on her shoulder, unable to reach her with his hands. Together, after a wait, they climbed back up the tunnel. The darkness beyond the cave was complete enough now that they had to negotiate their way out slowly, sniffing and choking, by touch. Outside the cave they held on to each other, sobbing, and then Leda pulled away from him and ran home.