The Leisure Seeker: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

the place everywhere—billboards, roofs, bumper stickers, on the sides of barns.
    “Come on, John, you want to go see the caverns?”
    “What for?” he says, in a tone that I don’t care for.
    I forget that I can’t really ask his opinion anymore because if he’s in one of his contrary moods, he will argue with me about whether water is wet. I have to remember what the doctors have told me, to not ask him, but to tell him.
    “Here we are,” I say, as we park near a statue of Frank and Jesse James. Apparently, those James boys hid out here for a while. As a fellow fugitive, I feel right at home. I grab my trusty cane and we head on in.
    Yet as soon as we try to purchase our tickets, we have problems. The young man behind the ticket desk gives me the once-over. He’s a red-faced little turd with a fake ranger uniform that’s two sizes too big for him.
    “Ma’am, the tour is kinda long. I think you’re gonna need, like, a wheelchair,” he says.
    “I most certainly do not,” I say.
    He makes a face like he just tasted something bad. “Thetour’s like about a mile and a half. Some of it’s uphill, and the walkways are wet a lot. We’ve had people, like, fall. It’s really, really hard to get a stretcher in there.”
    I look over at John. He shrugs, no help at all.
    “Fine,” I snap back, knowing that the little shit is probably right. A cavern is not the place for an old woman to keel over. (Or maybe it’s just the right place.) So, I climb into the wheelchair, which is so narrow that I can barely wedge my fat rump into it.
    “I’ve got you, mumma,” says John as he latches on to the handle grips.
    “Thank you, John,” I say, reaching back to touch his hand. Oh well, since he doesn’t mind, I might as well just enjoy the ride.
    Before we head into the caverns, we visit the restrooms, and then stop at the snack bar where John hastily devours what I believe to be his first-ever subterranean hot dog. (See? Travel does expand your horizons!) A few minutes later, it is announced that the tour group is heading out.
    As we enter, I realize that this will be nothing like my other cave experience. John and I and the kids once visited Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, where we waited hours for sunset at the mouth of the cave, when the bats would come out to gorge themselves on insects. (Only when you stop thinking about sunset, stop remembering to look, does it occur.) When the bats finally emerged, there were thousands and thousands of them, darkening, devouring the puce-purple sky. It was a terrifying and beautifulsight. Kevin kept his head beneath a beach towel the entire time.
    As I said, nothing like that’s going to happen here. What gives it away is the first cave, where the floor is actually covered with linoleum, like someone’s rumpus room. There are tables and chairs and a sparkly disco ball hanging from the ceiling. I cackle as John pushes me along.
    “Some cave,” I say, loud enough for the other six or seven people on the tour to hear. They all look over at us. Yes, I’m being a pill, but I don’t care.
    Our guide, a chubby young woman with stringy beige hair, deep circles under her eyes, and a bad cold, ignores me and begins her spiel in a nasal, singsongy voice. “In this cave here, which we call ‘the ballroom,’ we used to have dances back in the 1940s and ’50s. Can you imagine young men and women jitterbugging in a cave? Today, it is still available for rental.”
    Wonderful. A commercial.
    As we move deeper into the caverns, the linoleum eventually gives way to a lightly cobbled path that makes my wheelchair vibrate. There are long periods where our guide doesn’t say a word, she just croups in a loud, honking way that echoes around us. The caves get darker, and she casually flips light switches as she walks. We roll past long rooms of quivering underground pools, giant oozing stone formations, murky deep grottoes, all with lurid colors projected upon them—infectious reds,